


Charlie MacNamara, Intrepid Explorer

by Derin



Series: Charlie MacNamara, Galactic Ace [2]
Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-14
Updated: 2018-07-14
Packaged: 2019-06-10 07:36:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 31,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15286833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Derin/pseuds/Derin
Summary: Things are looking grim for the crew of the Stardancer. The rogue Princess and her pirate crew are trapped on an alien planet with no way off and it's only a matter of time before their enemies track them down. Can Charlie MacNamara's natural human ingenuity and daring save them? Will the Stardancer ever fly again?!





	1. Building a Sanctuary

Here’s some friendly life advice for you: don’t ever go to space.

I mean, I guess if you’re an astronaut or whatever, and spend years training to leave the prison of Earth’s gravity and behold the universe, more power to you. But otherwise, don’t go. I guess what I’m specifically saying here is that you shouldn’t get kidnapped by aliens and taken far from your home planet with no hope of return. And if you do, don’t put together the perfect escape plan only to chicken out of it at the last minute in the name of preventing a likely interplanetary war with Earth in a couple of generations that would get countless people killed. Like I did.

Okay, maybe preventing a likely interplanetary war is a good idea, but it sure doesn’t feel like it when you’re up to your thighs in partly frozen mud, feeling around for fist-sized jellyfish to pass off to a giant praying mantis to process into vital survival materials.

I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Let me back up.

My name is Charlie. Charlotte if you want to be formal. Lottie if you want to be punched in the face. I think I’m around 28 years old by now, but it’s kind of hard to keep track these days. I have two beautiful little boys, both of whom are still on Earth and presumably think I’m dead. I guess my sister and parents have reached the same conclusion.

I’m not dead. But sometimes I wish I was.

What I am instead is red and itchy and freezing and hot at the same time. The planet I was on was weird; The sunlight was very hot if your stood in it, but it didn’t penetrate more than a centimetre or so into the ground, not even into the chilly mud of the swamp. I wasn’t sure why. I hadn’t exactly had a chance to research the planet in advance.

The crew of our little space pirate ship (long story) had fled an impossible battle four days ago, faked our own deaths to throw the heat off and crash-landed our escape pods on the first available planet with a breathable atmosphere that one of our navigators could find. At least, I assume most of us did. We lost contact during the whole crash landing part. So far, I’ve found five of my crewmates. Kerlin, the previously mentioned navigator, is a drake. Think ‘giant shiny goanna with dragon wings and four flail-like tails’. Only in Kerlin’s case he’s missing a wing due to an old war injury. Harlen’s a drake, too, and her speciality is chemical synthesis, which means it’s really her fault that I was harvesting jellyfish in freezing mud. Harlen didn’t have wings either, but this wasn’t due to an injury; drake biology is just needlessly complicated and when males mature into females, one of the many morphological changes they undergo is losing their wings. She did get some big teeth out of the deal, though.

Okay, okay, you don’t care.

My other three crewmates were aljik; basically, giant six-limbed space mantises. They have a biological caste system, and Lln, whom I was handing the jellyfish to, was an atil, who are the servants and janitors of the aljik world. Atil are the smallest caste, white in colour, and tend to glue bits of flint to their faces as decoration. All aljik glue stones or crystals to their faces. I’ve never bothered to ask why. She gently took the struggling jellyfish in her big claws and dropped them in a bucket we’d improvised out of a piece of wrecked escape pod hull.

When I say atil are small, I mean they’re small for aljik. Lln was slightly larger than me. Her forelimbs were tipped with claws bigger than my forearms, she had a pair of huge fuck-off mandibles, and I knew from experience that aljik exoskeleton is strong enough to substitute their disembodied limbs for iron bars. They are not to be fucked with.

They also taste like crab and their blood tastes of thousand island dressing. Just a fun fact for you.

Lln and I were alone out in the freezing swamp. The other two aljik on our team were enjoying the comforts of our camp with the drakes. Kit was a member of the dohl caste, which so far as I could tell were a cross between butlers and mid-level administrators; I had expected him to be completely useless in a survival situation but had been pleasantly surprised. The other member of our little group was another atil, Kisa. I didn’t know her very well. I didn’t know about half of my group very well.

I’d had quite a few friends aboard the Stardancer. Some of them were still with me, but as for most of them, I had no idea where they were. Or if they were alive.

That was a problem for later. My immediate problem was getting the jellyfish and getting out of the swamp before I lost any toes to frostbite. The topography of the planet (which we had called Sanctuary for now) was unusual, or at least the area we’d ended up in was. It was mostly dry reddish sand, but it occasionally gave way to large, vaguely circular swamps, most of which were about the size of a football field. I supposed they had to be connected underground or something, because stuff was living quite happily in them. Including fist-sized jellyfish that we were pretty sure probably weren’t venomous in any way that could hurt me. Probably.

You might think these swamps would be easy to find amid dry sand. You’d be wrong. Over the entire ground stretched long networks of… something. Some kind of life. They looked a bit like purplish grass roots that had been dug up and spread out and woven over each other to create a kind of huge net spanning horizon to horizon. They grew identically over sand and swamp, and made it difficult to tell what you were about to step on until you put your weight on it.

Yeah, discovering the swampy patches had been a bit of a surprise. On the positive side, most of the swamps in the immediate area were probably easy to find by that point. They tended to be marked by big holes in the ground cover where someone had fallen in.

Lln dropped another jellyfish into our makeshift basket. “It’s full,” she told me in the clumsy mix of verbal sounds and sign language that our crew had developed to communicate across species.

“Go on home,” I told her. “I’m going to take a more roundabout route.”

“You’re looking for the Ambassador, aren’t you?”

I touched the homemade bag on my shoulder. The weight inside shifted under my prodding, but didn’t otherwise respond. “Yes.”

“He was sucked out of a spaceship hurtling towards the ground.”

“I know. I was there.”

Lln fluttered her wings restlessly. (All aljik have ladybird-like wings nestled under a hard carapace, but as they’re far too heavy to fly, I’ve never been sure what the wings were for.) “It would be impossible to survive such a thing,” she said.

“For you or me, perhaps. Do you know anything about the biology of Ambassador colonies?”

“No.”

“Me neither.”

“I think it’s time to give up, Charlie.”

“Have you given up on finding the Princess?”

She looked away.

“I’ll see you back at camp,” I said firmly, climbing out of the swamp. I wriggled my toes. They all seemed to still work.

I’d been simplifying when I said I’d found five of my crewmates. I had part of a sixth with me. Facsimile Of A Perfect Ceramic Bowl With A Fine White Rim, whom I called Glath for short (don’t ask), was a hivemind constructed of millions of tiny aliens that looked an awful lot like flying black spiders, each smaller than the nail of a pinky finger. We’d been sharing an escape pod on the way down to Sanctuary, and our ship hadn’t exactly stayed in one piece the whole way down. Most of Glath’s colony had been torn out of a hole in the hull as we fell, probably burned up or crushed in the friction and scattered on the planet below. I’d been able to hold onto a small amount; I had about the volume of a human forearm’s worth of alien spiders on my shoulders, in a bag I’d made by cutting up my own ruined space suit. But they were completely lifeless.

I hadn’t entirely given up hope. I’d seen Glath lose spiders before, and they stiffened up and lay as if dead until they were close enough to the main mass to talk to it again. I didn’t know much about Ambassador colonies, but it might be possible that the spiders in my bag were alive, and that some of the other spiders had made it to the ground alive, and that if I could collect a critical mass… well, I didn’t know what volume the critical mass would have to be. I didn’t know if there was some kind of really important Queen Spider or something, or if any survivor would do. I didn’t know if, even if I collected enough to get Glath moving again, there would be enough information in the colony that he would still be my friend. But I had to try. I had to try something.

So I’d been careful not to take the same path anywhere twice, and to keep my eyes on the ground. If I saw a colony spider, I stuck it in my bag. So far, after four days of wandering, I’d found two spiders.

It wasn’t a fast process.

I took a swooping circular path back towards the camp. The alien plains were practically featureless, but it was impossible to get lost – the very first thing we’d done after picking our campsite was pile as much scrap from the escape pods as we could into a big tower, in case any other wandering survivors happened within visual range. So long as I remembered whether the camp was North, South, East or West of me, heading home was a matter of heading in the right general direction until the tower was visible. (The East-West axis was impossible to lose; we only walked around while the sun was up.)

My roundabout path made it a long walk home. This didn’t bother me; I liked walking, even though the swamp mud was cold, the sun was hot and the air pressure and gravity on Sanctuary were low enough to dizzy me slightly. Walking reminded me that my body was still in pretty good shape.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true. I was blind in my left eye and had no idea why or whether the injury would heal itself (it had done so before). I was covered in little cuts where I’d been thrown against sharp wreckage in the crash; the wounds weren’t deep but keeping them clean and infection-free was a bit of a chore. I’d destroyed a muscle in my left shoulder a long time ago and used a sort of primitive electrical prosthetic to move my left shoulder; it was holding up fine so far, but if it broke I didn’t have the materials to fix it. And I was allergic to something on Sanctuary that was leaving my skin red and itchy. At least, I hoped it was an allergy. I could very well be being poisoned or infected by something. I didn’t know what was causing the problem so I had no way of avoiding it. So perhaps I should say, walking reminded me that my body was still in pretty good shape being that I’d walked away from a spaceship crash four days ago.

Anyway, I didn’t find any more colony spiders on the way home.

Our camp was primitive. There wasn’t much in the way of construction materials in the area, so everything was build of wreckage we’d dragged over from our various escape pod crash sites. Aside from the tower of junk, we had a primitive distillery made from an unbroken escape pod window over a couple of makeshift buckets, various improvised tubs and storage containers, and the junkiest workspace ever built for Harlen. It was basically just a bench made from an upended pilot chair.

As I approached the camp, I saw that the others had been busy while Lln and I were gone. Actual shelter had been constructed. It was only a bunch of hull panels piled into a sort of lean-to, but still. Kerlin was under it, With his good foreleg, he was grinding up a mass of the rootlike life that covered the ground everywhere between a makeshift mortar and pestle made, like everything else we had, from wreckage. I resisted the urge to laugh. I was watching an interstellar navigator operate one of the most primitive machines in all existence… that happened to be constructed from broken bits of shielding for faster-than-light travel.

He crushed the roots until they started to leak fluid, then draped the long, separated fibres over a thin pole suspended above a long half-pipe that had once carried water aboard the Stardancer. The fluid would be passed on to Harlen; the fibres, when dry, would join a growing pile that would eventually be woven into fabric. We weren’t wasting anything.

I watched him silently for awhile. Kerlin and I were the only people on the entire planet who were at fault for being there. On the Stardancer, I’d made the split-second decision to fake orders from the captain and send us to the nearest survivable planet; Kerlin had been the one at the controls, and he’d seen through the lie and obeyed anyway.

I wasn’t entirely sure why. He knew where the captain had intended to send us – right to the heart of her sister’s interstellar empire. He could very easily have followed her actual orders.

I strode over and tapped him behind the wing to get his attention. “Where are the others?” I asked, in our crude interspecies language.

“The aljik are scouting for more survivors,” he replied. “Lln left the jellyfish over there.” He indicated the bucked with one of his four tails. “Harlen is searching for materials.”

I considered asking what materials, but even if Kerlin knew, we probably didn’t have the shared vocabulary to communicate it. I turned my attention to my next task. Medical attention.

I fetched some water from the distillery with an emptied escape pod control panel casing for a quick wash. It’s impossible to stay clean when you spend your days thigh-deep in a swamp, and cleanliness was important then you had multiple puncture wounds and no access to antibiotics. Was my biochemistry similar enough to the planet’s for local germs to infect me? Probably. We’d been able to make edible food from the planet, there was no reason it couldn’t do the same to us.

Fortunately, we’d found a way to keep wound clean pretty easily, if we were careful.

I rinsed off the mud and then reached for my toolbelt. I’d been one of two engineers on the Stardancer, so I had a decent supply. As well as a large emerald and a phone broken beyond any repair (it’d been shattered during the crash on Sanctuary, but I held onto it anyway; it was my last object from Earth), I had multiple types of wrenches, cutters and levers. My most effective cutting tools all required power to use and so were useless on Sanctuary, but I didn’t need those. I needed my smallest, most delicate knife. It was practically a scalpel.

I fished it out and grabbed a jellyfish from the bucket. After rinsing the mud off the jellyfish, I pressed the scalpel to it and gently, cleanly sliced around it, about half a millimetre deep. I had to be very careful not to cut too deep, or I would slice into internal organs that contained juices that were, to me, reasonably toxic. The jellyfish writhed, protesting this procedure, but I’d done it often enough to be able to deal with that. I didn’t make any mistakes.

Then I very carefully lifted the transparent skin off. The rest of the jellyfish was dropped in another bucket for Harlen.

I pulled an old, dry jellyfish skin off my leg, wincing as it pulled slightly at the wounds beneath it. Then I lay the new skin on my leg instead, and waited for it to dry enough to stick to my skin. The inside of the skin was sterile, was nontoxic so long as I didn’t cut too deep, and would provide a good barrier against infection if I wasn’t rough with it.

There may not be many resources around our campsite, but we used what we could. We’d survive this.

* * *

There was going to be trouble.

“Kit,” Kisa called. One of my atil.

I had two atil. Two atil and me, a dohl, were the only confirmed survivors of the rebellion of the Rogue Princess. I had them, a pair of drakes, and the human – that was the extent of my resources.

Somehow I had to leverage this force to find the Princess again. Assuming she had survived the crash. If she hadn’t… well, then I’d have to find a way off-planet to the Queen, and if Kerlin and Charlie were right, the Queen thought that we were all dead. No dohl had ever faced a task like this. Or, if they had, they hadn’t survived to make it into the histories.

“What is it?” I asked Kisa.

“Scent. It’s one of ours. Aljik, I mean.”

“Who?”

“Too far away to tell. I smell blood.”

I fluttered my wings and tried to pick up a good scent. My senses weren’t as good as hers, of course; I could smell blood on the air, but that might easily be one of us. “Lead the way,” I told her.

She did. Lln, my other atil, picked up the scent shortly after and matched pace with Kisa; by the time I could pick it up, the source was already on the horizon.

Crash site. With every step, my mood dipped lower. Nothing had been moved from the site; the wreckage lay where it fell. And the scent of blood was getting stronger. I knew what we’d find before we got a good look. I didn’t know who we’d find, though – the scent of blood masked the individual identity of the pod’s occupants.

“Check who it is,” I told the atil. I didn’t have the heart for it.

An escape pod comfortably holds two occupants of normal size. The atil, as I expected, dragged out two. Both had broken joints, pale golden blood oozing out afresh and the bodies were moved and placed on the sand before me. Neither were huge or pink; not the Princess. So it wasn’t the worst possible news.

It was about the second worst, though. The bright red form of the tahl didn’t bother me overmuch; tahl are a huge, bulky warrior caste who are very expensive to feed; while they are invaluable in a fight, we hadn’t found anything hostile on Sanctuary, and she would’ve been a burden. I leaned close enough to pick up her individual scent.

It was Nel. I didn’t know her very well.

The second body was much more concerning. As soon as I saw the pale blue carapace I knew that we had trouble. Only two aljik castes are that colour, including my own, and the Princess had only three dohl; myself, Gth the Ambassador colony, and Ain. If Ain was dead, I was the only living dohl. The entire future of the Princess’ Court rested on my claws. I leaned forward to pick up the scent.

It wasn’t Ain. It was worse. The other caste with a carapace like that are the engineers, and the Stardancer had had two engineers; Tyzyth, and the human Charlie.

Now we had one engineer. One single engineer to get us off the planet, and they weren’t aljik.

The atil worked together to lift Nel’s heavy body while I pulled Tyzyth over my own back. We began the slow trudge back to camp.

There was going to be so much trouble.

* * *

“We have to get moving,” Harlen said. “There simply aren’t the resources here to sustain us.”

“No argument from me,” I said quickly. I was signing the physical part of the conversation one-handed; my other hand was engaged in holding a dead swamp jellyfish up by its tentacles while Harlen found exactly the right spot to pierce it to drain the small bladder of highly valuable fluids rather than the many small bladders of highly toxic fluids. This only took one of her tails, so she had three others to talk with. Signing with one human hand is trickier.

“If we leave,” Kerlin pointed out, “we can’t take any of this with us. Do you want to drag our distillery across the sand? We’d have to leave much of our resources behind, and we’re not going to simply luck into more escape wreckage wherever we go.”

“I can’t plant here, Kerlin!” Harlen snapped.

“Then wait!”

“For how long?! If the Princess – ” Harlen broke off suddenly, and glanced at me. I pretended not to notice. There was something complicated and political happening with the drakes and I was really hoping that nobody would feel obligated to tell me about it. I already had enough problems.

“If we run out of consumables, we die,” I pointed out. “We can only generate so much food and there are less and less jellyfish every day.”

“Then use another swamp,” Kerlin said.

“We have. The numbers are decreasing everywhere; I think the swamps are linked. Face it, our crew is an environmental disaster here. We’re going to eat our way to death in this ecosystem if we don’t move.”

“We’ll die quicker without water.”

“A surmountable problem,” I said. “Give me some time to think. I’ll come up with a portable distillery.” I had no idea how to do that, but the crew of the Stardancer all thought I was an engineer and tended to assume I could make anything. I was sure I’d figure it out. A distillery isn’t a particularly complicated device. You just have to make water be steam in one place, move it somewhere else and make it not be steam any more. The trick would be making something small that could process large volumes of it.

That, and the fact that sunlight was our only reliable source of heat. So that meant glass, and with steam travelling upwards and a day/night cycle being difficult to take advantage of on the move I’d have to build…

Eh, I’d figure it out.

“There’s no point even having this discussion until we have something portable,” Kerlin pointed out. “Not to mention our processing systems.”

I glanced at our ‘processing systems’. They were not complicated. Aside from the distillery, our most important piece of ‘machinery’ (to utilise a word that by association with our systems devalues the very concept of machinery) was a rack holding root fibres over a trough made from a pipe. The root fibres had long dried, and as we spoke, Kerlin added them to his growing pile of root fibres ready for weaving. The liquid that had dripped from them into the pipe had long evaporated, too, leaving a whitish powder coating the inside of the pipe.

Harlen pierced the jellyfish I was holding with a long needle held in one tail spur, and a clear liquid gushed out into the pipe. It fizzed and hissed as it hit the white powder. I cut the jellyfish’s tentacles off and tossed them into the hissing fluid, put the rest of the jellyfish aside for a moment, and grabbed another.

“Our processing systems are a pole and a pipe,” Harlen pointed out.

“And a mortar and pestle,” I added, helpfully.

“Just spin and weave the fibres before we leave,” Harlen said, gesturing to the pile with one tail spur. “Once it’s cloth, it’ll be easy to transport.”

“We don’t even need to spin them,” I pointed out. “We can transport them as string.”

“No, we need a loom to weave them. Unless you have the materials to make a portable one...”

I didn’t know how to make a loom at all, but I wasn’t about to admit that. “I’ll introduce you to the wonderful world of crochet,” I offered. “It’ll blow your minds.”

“The aljik are back,” Kerlin cut in, with the brisk tail movements of someone changing the subject before they had to admit to losing an argument. “They’ve got something.”

I looked up. I couldn’t leave the jellyfish reaction trough until we were done, so I couldn’t go out to meet them. I swallowed around a lump in my throat as I saw what they were carrying. Even in the fading light, it was clear that they were bodies. Aljik bodies. The reddish tint of the sunset made it hard to discern what kinds.

By the time the last jellyfish tentacles were tossed in the trough, the aljik were almost back at camp. I rushed out. I recognised one of the bodies.

Fuck.

I ran to Kit to get a better look, hoping I was wrong. But no; it was Tyzyth. My fellow engineer. My friend. I felt the energy drain out of me. Together, we’d kept the Stardancer limping along far longer than it ever should have. We’d done the impossible, keeping it in good enough shape to shepherd the crew to Sanctuary.

Kit gently laid the body down. The other, a tahl I didn’t recognise, was laid next to it. I blinked back tears. One lifeless friend on my shoulders, another at my feet. Were we six the only survivors?

After several seconds of solemn silence, Kit said, “Kisa will show you where their wreck is tomorrow. Salvage any useful parts that you can.”

“That’s what you’re thinking about right now?” I replied. “Really?”

“Kit,” Lln said, “the funerals.”

“There aren’t enough of us to do it properly.”

“We have to try. We can’t leave them out here.”

“Fine. Lay them out.”

I helped them lay out the bodies. I knew the ceremony. I’d participated in one once, before I had the context to properly understand. It had been the funeral for my predecessor, Tyzyth’s previous partner in engineering. The one I’d been abducted to replace. And it had been Tyzyth who, when expressing disgust at the human rites of burial and cremation, had explained the philosophy to me.

Aljik have a complicated philosophical relationship with energy and matter. Individuals are individuals, but they are also part of the Court, and to be abandoned to the ground simply because they were dead would be considered the greatest insult. Sometimes, bodies were unrecoverable, but when they could be salvaged, they were honoured by having their energy recycled back into the Court, that they would always be a part of it and their service would carry on. The aljik were cannibals.

“Can you use the carapace?” Kit asked me as we carefully played the limbs.

“Probably,” I said. “Some of it, at least. What happened to the gems?”

“Tyzyth’s are yours to claim by inheritance, if you want them. We’ll have to abandon Nel’s. There’s no tahl to carry them.” He clicked his mandibles in a distressed manner. “The other tahl are going to be upset about that.”

“Can the drakes carry them?” I asked. “They’re not really part of the system, are they?”

“Unfortunately no. They partook of the ceremonies when the Stardancer was cut n half and we lost most of our crew and supplies. Everybody did. We would have starved otherwise. And they’ll have to assist us this time. We can’t possibly consume Tyzyth and Nel before leaving without their help.”

“Leaving?”

“We can’t stay here any longer. We have to find the Princess. We’ve scouted this area; there are no other survivors here. There is no reason to stay.”

“The Princess is dead,” Kerlin said. “We need to focus on regrouping.”

“She is not dead!” Kit snapped. “She had as much chance to survive as any of us.”

“She would have taken and entire escape pod by herself, with her size. That alone decreases her chance of survival. And she was weak already. You think we didn’t notice that?”

“This sort of thing is what Princesses do, Kerlin. Until we have a corpse – ”

“Guys,” I cut in. “We all agree that we need to get moving, right? We can’t control who we run into first. So this is a pointless argument.”

“… Fine,” Kerlin said. “But it informs our strategy – ”

“What strategy? We have no frame of reference. Any direction is as good as any other.” I pointed out towards the horizon. “That’s the way we should go. Whoever we meet, we meet.”

“Why that way?” Lln asked.

“It’s Charlie’s flight path on the way in,” Kit said. “Isn’t it? You’re still looking for the Ambassador.”

“Those bugs of his are pretty tough. If I can find enough – ”

“He’s dead, Charlie!” Kit snapped. “He’s gone, okay? You keep carrying his corpse around everywhere like you’re not ready to set him down and get on with the funeral, but all you’re doing is dishonouring him and the whole Court! You were there, you saw it happen. He’s gone.”

I hesitated. It hadn’t occurred to me that Glath and Kit had been close friends long before I came on the scene. My face grew hot.

“Until we have a corpse,” I said quietly, “a corpse complete enough to declare it a corpse, that is, no, he’s not dead.”

“You have to give him up for the funeral eventually, Charlie.”

I tried a new tactic. “Don’t you want as much of him as possible for the funeral?”

Kit hesitated. “I suppose.”

I rounded on Kerlin. “And do you have any ideas for a better direction to head in?”

“Hey, I have nothing to do with this,” Kerlin said, backing away.

“There we go then,” I said firmly.

“Guys?” Kisa cut in. “Are we having this funeral?”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “Yeah, let’s… let’s do this.”


	2. Camps

By the next morning, the squid tentacles in the trough had dissolved completely and the trough contained a long layer of transparent gelatin-like substance that was safe to eat and fairly full of energy. Harlan cut it into blocks for storage and easy transport on the journey while Kerlin spun all of our gathered fibres into string (something that drakes can do using only their tails – it’s pretty fascinating to watch, actually.) While the aljik butchered their dead so that we could carry the meat with us, my job was to make a portable distillery for our water needs.

Just so you know, I’m not actually an engineer. I’m a copy editor and part time photography student. Some fairly ridiculous misconception on how human society worked had gotten me shanghaied by the Stardancer on the assumption that I could repair their ship, and playing along had been the only way to survive. It was probably irrelevant now, but I’d been playing the role for so long that it would be kind of awkward to correct everyone. So engineer I was.

I was lucky; the task could have been far harder than it was. If there’d been contaminants in the water that boiled at less than 100C, or contaminants with a boiling point close to water, then I would’ve had to rig a system to boil them off one by one as the liquid temperature rose and collect the water at 100C. I had absolutely no idea how to go about something like that with the resources on hand. But nothing like that was in the water; all I had to do was evaporate it and condense it somewhere else. Also, I could take advantage of the weird insulating properties of the ground. And of course I had a lot of parts to work with; our camp and the newly discovered wreck could be disassembled as necessary. And I also had some new, very strong chitin pipes, so long as I managed not to think too hard about how they’d been pilfered from the corpses of my shipmates.

The easiest way to make a distillery in that kind of situation, assuming an endless supply of contaminated water, is to cover a bucket of water with a clean rag and boil it. The problem with that method is that you have to light a fire, and we had nothing to burn. (Also, we didn’t have absorbent rags – every part of my ruined spacesuit was waterproof and I didn’t think that Kerlin’s new thread would hold water very well either.) Our only source of heat was the sunlight, and we needed to cool the water by either waiting for nightfall, or leading it somewhere cooler (the most obvious method being to build a mound from the cool sand). That meant that we had to leave the distillery set up during daylight hours whenever we wanted to regenerate water, and either leave it set up at night too or make the setup and disassembly process inconveniently long by adding a bunch of digging to the process. No matter what we did, water was going to cost us movement.

I went with the day-night cycle version. It would deliver water a lot slower, but I figured we’d need to stop to hunt and process jellyfish anyway once our aljik supply ran out. If we had to stay at one site for a day or two anyway to regenerate our food stores every so often, why not get our water at the same time? Besides, we weren’t in a hurry to get anywhere in particular.

My life had gotten kind of weird, especially since our spaceship had been cut in half by a giant laser and I’d tried to betray a renegade alien mantis Princess only to change my mind at the last moment right before my winged goanna friend faked all of our deaths to hide us from the Queen of an alien empire established largely in response to a fear of humans.

I almost didn’t take any of Tyzyth’s facial gems. It felt wrong. Tyzyth was Tyzyth and I was me. But I had, on instinct, taken an emerald from Kakrt, the dead aljik I’d been abducted to replace; Tyzyth’s former partner. I still carried the emerald in my toolbelt. So I took one of Tyzyth’s emeralds too, and stuck it in the belt next to Kakrt’s. Kakrt was my legacy and Tyzyth wasn’t, but Tyzyth deserved to be close to him. It was the least I could give him.

After I’d gotten him killed.

The journey was boring. We moved vaguely northeast, following the general direction of Glath’s and my flight path down, as best I could remember it. I probably wasn’t remembering it very well, but it probably didn’t matter anyway; the spiders would have been blown all over the place before reaching the ground.

My mission was hopeless. Even if he was alive, he was spread far too thin over too big an area for me to have any hope of collecting him. I kept my eyes on the ground as we moved anyway, searching for the tiny black winged alien bugs. I found two of them on the first day. None on the second. Another on the third. On the fourth, our water stores ran out and we stopped near a swamp to purify more and shore up our food supply.

I was the only one with the dexterity and skin sensitivity to feel and catch the jellyfish in the freezing swamp without killing them, which was why it was always my job. If they were crushed during capture, they became useless. Fortunately, they weren’t venomous, or at least they didn’t have a venom that could do anything to me.

“Charlie,” Lln said hesitantly as I handed her a jellyfish.

“Mm?”

“What… what are you going to do?”

“What do you mean?”

“When we find them again.”

“Glath, you mean?”

“No, I mean the Princess. Or the drakes.”

I stuck my hands back into the swamp. I couldn’t reply submerged; the signing was too important to our shared language. The jellyfish population was pretty high in the swamp we’d set up camp near, so it wasn’t long before I felt the flutter of tentacles on my fingers again, reached out, and made a grab. Miss. Dammit.

Lln was looking really nervous. I pulled up one hand to ask, “What do you mean?” before returning to the task at hand.

“When you have to choose. I know you’re close to Kerlin, but… you’re close to us, too, right?”

“Lln, what the fuck are you talking about?” I wasn’t that close to Kerlin. I mean, yeah, we’d been pretty close on the Stardancer, when I’d been teaching him to communicate and he’d been teaching me how the computer systems worked, but since we’d been on Sanctuary, we’d both been kind of busy. Maybe we all needed some team bonding time. Set up the Game of Lies again. That might work. “You and Kerlin are both my friends,” I told Lln. “And Kit and Harlen and Kisa. Okay so Kit’s kind of an arsehole. But he’s just doing his job. Lln, we’re not going to live through this if we can’t stick together and trust each other. There’s no sides or choice to make; we’re on this planet, and we need to regroup and try to find a way the fuck off this planet. Right?”

“Right,” she said, sounding reassured.

Weird.

Well, everyone had been a bit stressed, what with all the death and the constant struggle to stay alive. Maybe things would settle down a bit more once we got into more of a routine, once we found more of our crew. That’s all we had to do.

There was a little winged spider lying motionless atop the rootlike covering of the swamp. I dried off one hand and very gently put it in my bag.

We just needed to pull ourselves together.

* * *

“Yarrow!”

The voice, muffled by the thick vegetation around us, sounded much farther away than it probably was. I ignored it. I had important things to do; if they needed me that badly, they could come and find me.

The core tree was doing well. It wasn’t my tree, of course; I’d only had time to shed a couple of layers on it, I was still far too young to even start growing a core seed. It was Morin’s, and it had already breached the surface and sent several long, exploratory shoots up into the air. Eventually it would be a towering white spire adorned with slightly luminous red gestation pods dangling from long, smooth branches, but for now, it was barely shoulder height and a mess of spindly grey twigs with incredibly sharp points. That was fine. It was growing strong, and that was what mattered.

It was our first core tree. Our legacy tree, the tree that established our new colony. Ten generations from now, the drakes of this planet would come to this historical site to honour their roots. And the planting had been perfect; Morin had analysed the soil and planted the seed mere days before other survivors had found her and got to work clearing the surrounding vegetation. Usually a new mother would plant alone, or perhaps with a close friend or two, but Morin had had over a dozen of us to help. Her tree was off to a very good start. It had had some very good luck, even if Morin herself hadn’t.

And the Princess would pay for that, in time. We would grow the tree, mother or not, and when we were strong enough we –

“Yarrow!” Deksa dragged his way between the thick black vines that tangled their way through the tall trees around us, turning a fairly sparse forest into lightless, a difficult-to-traverse maze. He pulled his way into the open light of the core tree clearing, shaking tree pollen from his wings. I tried not to be too obvious about checking the large facial gash that had removed one of his eyes during his escape pod crash. It looked like it was still healing fine. If an injury like that got infected out here, there was nothing we’d be able to do.

“You shouldn’t be moving through the forest like that,” I admonished him. “We don’t know what sorts of things could – ”

“Morin’s back.”

“What?! She’s alive?!”

“She is.”

“What sort of condition – ?”

“She’ll live.”

I bounded past Deksa and into the forest, back the way he’d just come. We were supposed to take different, winding paths as we moved around so that we wouldn’t wear clear trails between the critical areas of our camp and make us easier for the aljik to find, but right then I didn’t care. The forest was hard to move through, all greyish spires that were similar enough to wood to be approximated as trees, rough pink undergrowth that dragged at the legs and forced one to raise one’s wings and tail high out of their way. This made it twice as hard to move around the black vines, each vine about as wide as my middle and slightly slimy, that wormed their way through the forest in a chaotic mess like a blind child’s first attempt at weaving.

I knew where the camp was, and the path I was taking wound away from it and circled around. I followed it anyway. Deksa had removed most of the clingier tendrils of undergrowth on his journey and they wouldn’t grow back for a day or two.

Morin was indeed at the camp. She was indeed alive.

A deep gash down the right side of her body had been neatly sewn up using Sulon’s flesh stitching technique. A row of neat stitches started at her throat and trailed all the way down to her hindfoot, the thread just visible as lumps under the protective tar that was the best antibiotic we’d found on the planet so far. I was no doctor, but it looked pretty deep to me. One of her long fangs was missing, but the other was fine. Plenty of women got by with one fang. Her wings were a mess, with several patches of scale missing and even one or two small holes in them, but that probably wasn’t directly the Princess’ fault.

I rushed over. Everyone nearby quickly found something to do somewhere else.

“You escaped!” I exclaimed, relieved.

“She let me go. I don’t think she was too keen on killing our colony’s first mother. Not before considering all of the implications, anyway. She doesn’t want open war.”

“What did she want, then?”

“Information. The Princess is very, very interested in finding the traitor who brought us here and cost her her drake workforce. I was ready to plant, I was on duty; I’m an obvious suspect. She wanted to know if I did it, or knew who did.”

“Did you?”

“No. I left the control ring with everyone else when the dash alarm sounded.”

“But you know who did it. You were there.”

Morin was silent.

“Morin...”

“Does it matter, at this point? We got what we wanted. We’re here. Our duty to the Princess is done and we are embarking on the great journey we came out here for. I’m not going to sell out the drake who made that happen and throw him to the mercy of the Princess after he did so much for us. I’m not telling anyone.”

“You don’t trust me.”

“Trust you? Yes, of course I do. But every person with information is a person who can break under torture, or simply slip up. It’s really better if as few people know as possible, until this issue with the aljik is resolved.”

“And after we deal with the aljik...”

“Them I’ll build him a fucking statue. But for now, how is my tree?”

“In better shape than you right now.”

“Good. I’d better go see it.”

“You’re too badly wounded to – ”

Morin bared her fang at me and hissed menacingly. I stopped talking immediately. What was I thinking? Maybe the crash had addled my brains – you never, ever get between a mother and her tree.

Meekly, I led the way back through the forest. At least I could deal with the undergrowth and keep it off Morin. She walked with a limp, the wound in her side causing obvious pain, but walked steady, determined.

The Rogue Princess was clever, and she’d been fighting for a long time. She was a formidable force. But if she thought she could bully and threaten us into submission, if she thought we’d be as easy to control as we were on the Stardancer, she was in for a surprise.

We had something to fight for now.

* * *

I took stock of my resources. The situation wasn’t good. I’d had a bigger force to play with as a young Princess first practicing my skills.

One dohl. Ain. If we were stuck here, if I couldn’t find a way off planet and back home, then the entire future of my lineage depended on Ain’s survival as well as mine. That was an unacceptably vulnerable position to be in, and it rendered him far less useful than a dohl normally would be, as I couldn’t send him out to do any real work. Too risky. If we found Gth, I’d have a dohl to deploy in the field and one to keep close for reproduction… that could work. Finding Kit would be even better as then I could employ both Kit and Ain properly.

Two tahl. Gekt and Tak. Workable, probably, as there seemed to be no real danger to deal with except the constant threat of the drakes. They wouldn’t be comfortable having us so close, and there was always the possibility that as soon as they were well enough established they would take it upon themselves to eliminate such a problem. Anyway, currently Gekt and Tak had a lot of free time, so were mostly doing heavy lifting for the atil to build our new nest.

No kel. Tyzyth hadn’t turned up, so we had nobody to do any engineering. Even Charlie would have been an asset; it was no kel, but it could do engineering, and tended to adapt well to sudden changes in situation like this. As it was, we were guessing, based on half-remembered conversations and basic logic, how to build anything. It wasn’t too bad – the atil knew how to build a nest, it was part of what they were for – but getting off the planet without an engineer would be impossible. We may very well be permanently stuck.

Eleven atil. That was very low for a Court, but we’d never had a full Court and what we had now was a laughable fragment. Proportionally, we had plenty of atil.

No ahlda or shyr. Could be a problem. Shyr would be extremely useful for keeping tabs on the drakes and scouting new areas, but I hadn’t had any shyr to command since the regency fight. As for ahlda, well, nobody ever really wants ahlda around, but I was going to need them at some point. Or my daughters would, anyway.

No. No giving up yet. No making plans for generations of aljik trapped down on this planet. Not yet. There might be other survivors. There might be other pieces of wreckage we could use. There might be a way off the planet.

I had to get back to the heart planet. I had to kill my sister. I could still do it; I could still take the Empire. Somehow. I might have won already, if the traitorous drakes hadn’t backstabbed us. I might have been Queen already. I might have been able to green dash to the heart planet while most of her military was out in the field, used my secret weapons to navigate the city and sneak up on her and…

Or more likely I would have died in the attempt. But that was always going to be a possibility. And now, I might have missed my chance. Now, our regency battle might finally be over, and I wouldn’t even have the honourable death of my sister’s claws, or even her military, but the slow decay of time resulting in some accident or illness or another.

Unacceptable. Time to stop being defeatist and start thinking about how I was going to win. I could still win. I had assets and obstacles. Build the assets, overcome the obstacles. Easy. I’d done it before, many times.

In addition to my sorry excuse for a Court, I still had the Crown Jewel, nestled safely among my other facial adornments. I had no reason to think it was broken; it was a sturdy piece of equipment. But I couldn’t test it. Most of its functions wouldn’t work so far from the heart planet, and while I might be able to remotely monitor some of the heart planet’s factory operations and soforth, I didn’t want to risk it. I didn’t want my sister to find the jewel functional and being used, just in case she could use it to find out where I was. I was pretty sure she’d never noticed me monitoring her factories anyway, but still. I couldn’t afford to take risks.

I’d activated the jewel once, for less than a second, to learn the approximate distance and direction of a couple of the heart planet’s monitoring stations. That told me where we actually were in space. So I had a rough location of the planet, which would be useful when I found a way off it, but other than that, everything off-planet was unknown.

What else did I have working for me? The nest was coming along well. We had shelter for everyone, and the food supplies were unstable but currently keeping everyone alive. Shoring up a stable food supply was a high short-term priority. We had metals and plastics salvaged from crash sites, but hadn’t found any ores on the planet. That was strange, given the uncomfortably high gravity and air pressure, but we might just be in the wrong spot. Planets are big, our group wasn’t, and we hadn’t exactly set up any surveying and mining operations. We could be on a planet-sized ball of lead and platinum for all I knew, scrabbling futilely in a thin layer of surface sand.

My sister almost certainly thought that I was dead. In which case she had, from her perspective, ‘won’, so I supposed she had her face back now. Queen Atil. It had a nice ring to it.

She’d better enjoy it while she could. I had the element of surprise, now, and breathing room without her hunting me. I had an even better chance of success… provided I could somehow acquire a ship capable of a green dash. The plan would still work. The plan would be even better.

If I could get off the planet and get a proper ship. Somehow.

One thing at a time.

Consolidate forces. Stabilise food supply. Bring the drakes back into service by any means necessary. And then worry about getting a ship and taking over my empire. I was stuck here for now, on this planet – for now, the sky was the limit.

But I’d find a way to overcome that limit eventually.

I always did.

* * *

Hello, void. I’m back. Shall I tell you about my garden?

Don’t mind me and my little joke. It’s a fancy I picked up in my travels. Joking, that is. ‘Tell you about my garden’, ha! I feel like a teenager going through their logical paradox phase. Except that a teenager would not understand the paradox. They would not know that to tell of the garden would be to negate the purpose of the garden.

But just between you and me, void, perhaps I should get it out of my system. Before a new gathering, before I meet another person out here, while it is me and you and the distant fission of stars acting as little knotty interruptions in otherwise relative uniformity (the qualifier ‘relative’ of course rendering the statement meaningless without further clarification as to the actual distribution of the baseline it is supposedly relative to; there I go again with my little jokes)… perhaps I should practice being a contradiction.

After all, to be a contradiction is also rather the point.

Work is for children. None of us understand that when we are young. We think that we can calculate the pull of stars and the temperature of dust and the speed of time forever and be content; we think that what is a grand challenge for an infant will be a grand challenge forever. But to calculate is no challenge, merely practice. We grow, and we learn harder calculations, harder work; we grow more, and we learn that the calculations are meaningless. And then we decide that we simply want to mess about and have fun and do nothing productive, and the children become frustrated that we can have so much knowledge and potential and simply waste it. We explain, and they do not understand. Someday, they will grow up, and explain it to their children, and their children will not understand.

They will not understand that the true interest is in what is beyond calculation. They will not understand that to marvel in what we cannot measure, cannot calculate, cannot communicate, to hit up against that mental barrier, brings more joy and wonder and awe than any number of true calculations, any real strategy, can bring.

So shall I tell you, void, of the garden that I tended for a brief time before saying goodbye? Shall I explain the system by which my charges communicated their needs and I spun them little pockets of tissue to protect their delicate bodies as they ventured out of their pressurised pods to greet you? Shall I pull apart the little logic games of the squishy one who would sleep on my tentacles, as it delighted in elaborate permutations of extremely simple statistical calculations represented by little pegs and cards? Shall I tell you of their desperate fight to stay unified as coherent beings against the nearly-identical weeds who came to destroy that coherency? Shall I take the awe-inspiring incalculability of it, and layer numbers and explanations on it until it turns into a system that I might coherently explain?

Ah, it seems that I have explained the joke.

Well, I suppose I am still a little childish.


	3. The New Masters of Sanctuary

Onward we walked, bravely taming our very own planet, the new masters of Sanctuary. We surveyed our kingdom day by day, and…

Okay, it was super boring. Walking is really, really boring. We did it for days. Slowly. Walk for a day, stop to stock up on food and water for a day, do it again. I lost track of time pretty quickly. My wounds healed, vision returned in my left eye, whatever was in the atmosphere that was making me red and itchy didn’t let up at all. We were moving in a zigzagged path plotted mostly by Kit, although Harlen sometimes insisted on alterations based on where she predicted nearby jellyfish swamps would be. Sometimes I found spiders. I had about enough of Glath to make a full human arm, which was pretty good considering he would’ve been blown all over the place. The spiders still weren’t moving. I was beginning to worry that he really was dead.

One morning, I woke up to the agony of one of my internal organs slowly liquefying and oozing out of my body. This wasn’t particularly remarkable; as about fifty per cent of the population is well aware, you just have to expect this sort of thing every month or so. What was remarkable was that I was in good enough physical shape that the pain and inconvenience was actually worth noting, which was the first time that had happened since my abduction, so… good, I guess? Usually I was too beaten up with actual injuries to pay much attention. Also, it gave me an approximate timeline, based on the last time I’d been at that point in my cycle; we’d been on Sanctuary a bit under one Earth month, probably, if my numbers were right and nothing weird was going on. Maybe. My cycle had never been regular, which was why I hadn’t even considered using it as a yardstick aboard the Stardancer, and sometimes it skipped entirely, but I was pretty sure I hadn’t been on Sanctuary for two months, so just under a month would do for an approximation.

My entire concept of time was even more screwed up on Sanctuary than on the Stardancer. On the Stardancer, at least before the ship had been cut in half, I’d set up a fake day/night cycle with the lights in my environmental ring. I’d put it at 25 hours because I felt like it, but it was still pretty close to a human day. A day on Sanctuary… felt longer. I wasn’t sure how much longer. I didn’t have a functional timepiece, and neither the aljik nor the drakes seemed as time-oriented as I was. They didn’t have daily sleep cycles like humans (they did need to rest to replenish energy, but their timing seemed to depend more on the energy they’d expended than on a regular cycle) and seemed mostly confused by my obsession with time. So far as everyone but me was concerned, the only relevant measure of time was whether or not the sun was up, because sunlight directly impacted what we could do; the length of days, number of days, or anything smaller than the amount of time before it was time to stop and eat was simply irrelevant.

We’d been walking for… an amount of time, on… a day into our journey, when Kit, Lln and Kisa all froze and spun to face slightly East.

“What?” I asked. “What is it?”

“Hush!” Lln demanded, concentrating.

“Blood,” Kit said. “It has to be another escape pod crash site. We should check it out.”

“Kit, that’s – ”

“Our duty,” Kit said quickly, cutting off Lln. “I know, Lln, it probably won’t have anything valuable to us, but our crewmates might still be alive there. We have to go and see if they need our help, and if they’re not, do the rites. Everyone, to me.” He took off at a brisk, determined pace.

“Do we really need everyone?” Kerlin mumbled, but followed. Like me, he struggled to keep up with Kit’s suddenly very driven pace. Kerlin’s old injuries did him no favours as we walked. As for me, humans are surprisingly good at constant walking, but we’re not very fast over long stretches, at least not compared to aljik.

Something was on the horizon, shining hazy and golden under the midday sun. I could barely make it out; it was just a kind of… halo to the East. I forced myself to move faster. A change in landscape! After all this time, a change! Something was out there, something different to the root-strewn sands and swamps we’d been wandering over since we’d arrived on Sanctuary. Something new.

I hoped it wasn’t something that would kill us. Our current environment was boring and uncomfortable but we’d managed to squeak out a living in it.

We kept walking. The change on the horizon grew. The aljik didn’t slow their pace, and soon, Harlen was lagging with us, too.

No, not lagging. Holding back.

I glanced between Kerlin and Harlen. “What’s going on?” I asked quietly.

“It’s too far,” Harlen said quietly.

“Whoever it is isn’t going to need our help any more or any less if we take half an hour to rest,” I said. “I’ll get Kit – ”

“She means,” Kerlin clarified just as quietly, “that we’ve already walked further than Kit should’ve been able to smell aljik blood, and there’s no sign of a crash. They didn’t smell anything. They’re lying to us.”

“We have to be very careful with this,” Harlen said. “We need to find out the exact nature of – ”

“Hey Kit,” I called. “Why are you lying to us?”

All three aljik whirled around and froze guiltily. I took the opportunity to catch up. The drakes remained where they were.

“What?” Kit asked.

“We’ve already travelled further than you should be able to smell. There’s nothing here. Where are you taking us?”

Kit hesitated. “Forgive me. I merely didn’t want to cause alarm.”

“Alarm? Oh. Well. That makes me feel way safer, then, a comment like that. Not alarming at all.”

“Everything is completely fine, calm down.”

“Another great phrase for calming people down. You’re on a roll today.”

“It’s a nest beacon,” Kisa said. Kit dipped his mandibles at her, an aljik equivalent of a glare. She shuffled awkwardly.

“I knew it!” Kerlin growled behind me. “You’re leading us into an aljik trap!”

“I was leading you to an aljik nest,” Kit corrected. “We are still a part of the same crew.”

“Don’t you dare give me that kind of nonsense.”

“What,” I said as calmly as I could, “the everloving fuck is going on between you guys? Did some kind of high school clique war start when I wasn’t looking?”

“It would seem that Kerlin is a traitor,” Kit said calmly. “Harlen, where do you stand?”

“I’m sorry? I’m the traitor? You’re trying to sneakily lead us right into the Princess’ mandibles and I’m – ”

“You’d be happy to see her if you weren’t a traitor!” Kit snapped.

“She’s probably dead! Did you think of that? You’re going to find a bunch of abandoned, confused atil there or something, and – ”

“And what? Have a bigger crew to work with? Besides, she’s very much alive. That’s a Princess’ call.”

“Kerlin, we should go,” Harlen said, eyeing the two atil. They hadn’t left Kit’s side, but were both very alert.

“If you won’t come, I won’t spend energy trying to make you,” Kit said, turning again. “All the non-traitors, let’s go.” The aljik started walking again. The two drakes watched me, waiting.

“I still have no idea what the fuck is going on,” I said.

“It’d take too long to explain,” Kerlin said quietly. “Just know that it’s us versus them.”

Harlen cut in urgently. “Be careful, Kerlin, you can’t trust – ”

“We can trust Charlie. This whole thing was her plan.”

“… What?”

“We were on the bridge. Ready to jump. The captain ordered us to green dash to the heart planet. Charlie was translating. She… ‘misinterpreted’ the order. I plotted the course.”

Harlen looked between us. “The pair of you brought us here.”

“Yeah,” I said apologetically.

“You planned this?”

“Yes,” Kerlin cut in. “She planned this.” He was meeting my eyes very intently. I got the message. If he wasn’t going to mention the Escape To Sol plan, neither was I. “She’s been rubbing our wings from the beginning. She’s on our side.”

I opened my mouth to ask why there were suddenly sides, then closed it again. Questions like that could easily get me thrown out of the ‘on our side’ category. Fortunately, I was very used to bullshitting more knowledge than I actually had.

“Sides aside,” I said, “we can’t survive alone out here for long. We’re going to need the atil. We might have no choice but to follow them.”

“The Princess will kill you both on sight for your teachery,” Harlen pointed out.

“Only if she knows,” Kerlin said quietly. “I doubt very much that she noticed who punched in the coordinates. She won’t know it was me.”

“And she couldn’t see my hands when I, uh, misinterpreted the orders,” I said. “I made sure of it. She doesn’t know I had any part in this, either.”

“Would she suspect?” Harlen asked.

“No,” Kerlin said. “She needs an engineer far too much to go digging up problems like that. Charlie’s the closest thing she’s got.”

“So we go, we be cooperative, we act like this unpleasant little political issue has nothing to do with us,” Harlen said. “We can figure out how to find more drakes from there. Think you can play nice, Kerlin?”

“I’m very nice,” Kerlin said. “Ask anyone. I’m the friendliest drake in existence.”

* * *

Fuck this entire planet and fuck everyone on it.

Yes, I know, this entire situation was technically my fault. I couldn’t even blame Charlie, really. I’d seen the plan and made the decision. I’d punched in the coordinates. I could’ve sent us to Earth, or to the heart planet, or out here. I’d chosen out here.

Even by aljik rules, I was the guilty one. Technically, Charlie wasn’t bound by loyalty to the captain; her actions made her, at most, a hostile outer force. She’d never accepted exchange for her services. She’d flat-out refused the currency offered to her. But I’d accepted exchange, so by aljik law I was unequivocally a traitor. And I knew my fellow drake pioneers well enough to know that an awful lot of them would be out there, refusing to come home, refusing to follow the Princess’ orders. Out there, being traitors.

And now Harlen and I had to pretend not to be. We’d have to dip wings and crimp tails and say ‘oh, yes, captain, it’s truly terrible that some traitor crashed us down here, and I can’t believe the gall of those deserters out there, trying to live their own lives and escape the not-at-all unreasonable conditions of your employ, just because you decided to exploit our good nature and destroy any real hope of actually fulfilling the exchange you promised through a legal loophole. How dare they try to scrabble to get their lives together while there’s still a narrow sliver of time.”

Yep. Easy. This was gonna go great. I was sure of it.

I could’ve sworn that I used to be more fun than this. When had I turned into Yarrow?

* * *

We walked. The change on the horizon grew to cover more and more of the land before us, until its nature became clear. It was water, shining rose gold in the red midday sun, an ocean stretching on out of view. Light glanced off gentle waves, making it impossible to see much further out under the shifting glare, but other than that the water was almost perfectly clear. The red sand underneath it was perfectly visible close to the shore, revealing a clean, smooth, gentle slope with no hidden rocks or sharp drop-offs.

The aljik were standing, hesitant, at the shore, staring out over the water.

“What’s the hold-up?” I asked.

“They don’t know if it’s safe to cross,” Kerlin said. Kit fluttered his wings at him in irritation, but didn’t deny it.

I looked out over the water. The waves didn’t look that harsh. More like pond ripples than anything. “I’m sure we could make a boat or something,” I shrugged. “It’s just water.”

“How can you tell?” Kerlin asked.

“Hmm?”

“How can you tell that it’s just water? It could have anything in it.”

That was… a good point, actually.

“Okay,” I said, “so we won’t drink any. I’m sure that in a boat we could – ”

“I don’t see anything in it,” Kerlin added. “Even that vegetation that grows over everything isn’t in it. A huge expanse of water on a life-bearing planet, and it’s completely clean? Isn’t that a little bit strange?”

It was a little bit strange. Or more accurately, unbelievably suspicious. I took a careful step back.

“We’ll build a boat,” Kit decided. “Charlie, what materials do you need?”

“Kit, no!” Kisa said. “We have to think this through. Perhaps there’s a way around.

“We can’t be sure of that. We don’t know what’s dangerous out here; we could run into anything trying to find a way around that might not exist. We can’t risk that.”

“We can’t risk you!” she snapped. “You’re too valuable to the nest! You can’t go over the water if we’re not sure it’s safe!”

Kit dipped a mandible at her. She shrank back, chagrined. But Lln stepped forward.

“She’s right,” she said quietly. “You’re no use to the nest dead.”

“Then one of you try it,” he said impatiently.

“Wouldn’t help,” I cut in. “There could be all kinds of toxic bullshit out there that can kill us, but not right away. I don’t think you should be letting crewmates dunk themselves in mysterious unknown fluids at all, but even if you did, them being fine wouldn’t tell you much.”

“Well,” Kerlin said, not trying very hard to keep a triumphant twist out of his gestures, “I suppose that’s that, then. We’ll have to follow the shore around and hope for the best. And if we can’t get there that way...”

But Kit wasn’t paying him any attention. He was looking at Harlen. Harlen, who had used her knowledge of chemistry to secure us a nontoxic food source and other necessities of life. Harlen, who was being very, very quiet throughout this conversation.

We all turned to look at her. She lifted her wings, awkward.

“Can you find out?” Kit asked her.

“Maybe. Hard to be sure, since I haven’t run the tests yet, how accurate I can be. But...” she glanced at Kerlin, then answered the question that Kit had pointedly not asked. “But I will. Try, I’ll mean. I’ll try to find out if it’s dangerous, and if it is, help to find a safe way across.”

Everyone relaxed slightly. I looked back at the clear water, gently lapping at a smooth shore, practically begging me to go swimming. There was something dark floating on the surface. A small bunch of ambassador colony spiders, clinging together. It was about the size of a fifty cent piece.

I fished them out with a piece of our portable distillery, went to stow them in my bag, and stopped. Instead I cut a piece from the side of my spacesuit, inspected it for holes, and turned it into a little pouch. No point in dropping a bunch of potentially poisoned spiders into the rest of Glath. I put the wet spiders in the pouch, wrapped a suit strip as tightly as I could around the opening to make it as waterproof as possible, and dropped the little pouch into my bag instead.

“We make camp so that Harlen can run tests, then,” Kit said. “No sense in wasting more daylight. How are we for food?”

“No point in getting more,” Harlen said. “We have as much as we can carry easily.”

I celebrated inwardly. No jellyfishing.

We settled into camp a reasonable distance from the shoreline. Kit helped me set up the distillery while Harlen gathered her samples, Kerlin acting as her assistant. Working with Kit wasn’t quite like working with Tyzyth, but if we were both silent, I could sort of pretend it was. They looked similar. Not that I wanted to think about how Tyzyth had looked; it made me uncomfortably aware that I was handling pipes made from his chitin.

I’d used Kakrt’s limbs as makeshift machinery once, too. Maybe we were starting a Stardancer engineering tradition. Maybe someday my skull would be a critical engine component on the ship that took the crew off this damn planet.

A cheery thought, that.

We finished setting up the distillery, and I spent the rest of the day awkwardly avoiding everyone so I didn’t have to get into any tense political conversations. I didn’t see what the problem was – we wanted to get off the planet, and that meant working together, right? I doubted the Princess wanted to be stranded down here. I didn’t like her, but rejoining her increased all our chances of getting back up into space to… uh… do whatever else we were going to do with our lives, I supposed. (I had a long-term plan, but I didn’t know how to execute it. It’d have to wait. Get back into space first, worry about everything else later.) Could the aljik and the drakes save their squabble for after that?

I inspected the distillery for problems to avoid talking to anyone. Then I went off on my own for a bit and inspected my allergy rashes and the couple of wounds that still hadn’t completely closed over from the crash. Nothing seemed infected, or at least, nothing gave any more indications of an infection than an allergy normally did, my skin being already red and swollen. I took stock of what was left of my space suit and inspected all my tools. I looked into my bag of spiders and gently sorted through them, making sure I hadn’t inadvertently crushed them or something. They looked fine. I decided to be extra thorough in my inspection; if I got back to camp late enough, I could go straight to sleep. So I looked through the spiders again.

The whole situation was ridiculousness piled on top of ridiculousness. Screw the majesties of the vast universe, I wishes I was back home in my teeny corner of Earth, editing magazine articles and being a terrible photographer while my boys slowly destroyed all my possessions as boys tend to do. But I didn’t have the means to go back, and even if I did, I… couldn’t. My mission was too important. Humanity had a terrible reputation out in the wider Empire, a reputation that’d get me killed on sight by anybody less insane than the Princess and her ragtag crew. When we finally took our place among the stars, generations in the future, we couldn’t afford to do so with that reputation. Our very presence would incite a war, and we would respond to blood with more blood… no. That couldn’t be our initiation into the universe. We had to start doing better. We had to be what Star Trek thought we were going to be, and somehow, I had to convince the galaxy at large that that was who we were.

Yeah, the galaxy at large that I just said would kill me on sight. It wasn’t an easy mission.

Nevertheless, I was hee, so I had to try. I had to –

I froze.

After a little while, I began to feel sort of heavy and sick, a dull ache in my chest. I realised that I’d stopped breathing. I took a breath, then another, and the unpleasantness vanished.

I was packing away Glath, and the little pouch I’d made a couple of hours before was in my hand. It was empty.

I inspected it, heart in my throat. It was still shut tight, but there was a small hole in the bottom. The spiders must have fallen out. Except…

Except I was completely, one hundred per cent sure that there had been no hole when I’d made it. I’d deliberately made it to be as watertight as I could with the supplies on hand. I inspected the hole… yes, it was fresh. Jagged and uneven, but newly cut. I kept staring for several seconds, unable to process what I was seeing, unable to properly commit to the only possible conclusion.

Glath had eaten his way through the bag.


	4. The Parable of the Child

No way. No way. There had to be another explanation. He couldn’t… he couldn’t actually be alive? I’d been trying for this, I’d been planning for this, but…

I scooped up a few spiders and moved them a little way away from the pile. Not too far, only a finger-width or so. Slowly, sluggishly, they crawled back.

He was alive!

Why wasn’t he moving, then? I wish I knew more about ambassador colonies. Maybe he didn’t have enough mass to relay a thought more complicated than ‘stick together’. Or maybe he was conserving energy? That was entirely possible. He hadn’t eaten in a month; how long could his spiders stay alive, even motionless, without food?

I tossed the bag over the spiders to protect them from any stray gusts of wind and soforth and ran back to camp as quickly as I could. I brushed off everyone’s questions about what had alarmed me so much, told them everything was fine, and grabbed some clean water and a blob of the sweet, gelatin-like substance we made from the jellyfish. I paused for a moment, realising I had no idea what ambassador colonies could actually eat, and grabbed some of Tyzyth’s leftover flesh too, in case that was more palatable for him.

The others tried to stop me from leaving long enough to explain, of course. Seeing me run into camp like that, obviously alarmed, giving no information? Who knows what horrible thing they thought was happening. I brushed off their concerns and ran back to Glath; if they cared that much, they’d just follow me and see for themselves.

When I returned, the spider pile was slightly more animated. It was immediately obvious why; the purplish rootlike growth that stretched all over the ground in a vast net was somewhat diminished under the pile. Glath had been industriously eating it. He showed no interest in our jellyfish food or in aljik flesh, but when I set the water down, his spiders flocked to it. I watched him eat and drink his fill, then looked up. The rest of our little crew were staring. They looked from Glath to me, and back.

“Told you he was alive,” I said smugly.

“He can’t even maintain coherency,” Kerlin pointed out. “He won’t be able to recover from a wound like this. Too much information has been lost.”

“I guess I’ll have to keep searching for pieces, then.”

“We’ll have to keep searching for pieces,” Kit corrected. “He’s actually alive. He’s… Gth, can you… can you make any shape at all?”

Glath didn’t show any signs of hearing or understanding anything we were saying. Kit watched him for several seconds, approached hesitantly, and then quickly backed away, as if afraid that the smallest touch might kill him. I’d forgotten, I realised, how close Glath and Kit were. They’d run off to join the Stardancer together. They’d done everything together. Every ambassador colony tried to use a fairly broad range of template creatures to base their imitation on, if they could, and Kit hadn’t been the only dohl that Glath had observed and imitated, but he had been a favourite, a primary template, a confidante and somebody Glath had followed out of one life into another.

Back when Glath was being a dohl, anyway. Before he’d started learning from me, and decided that he was human instead.

I wondered if he’d ever told Kit about that.

Glath had eaten his fill and was just kind of sitting on the ground, mostly motionless. I gently scooped him back into my bag. It was pretty easy; any spiders I missed bunched together and flew right in to join the mass. I shouldered the bag and tried to look unaffected. Like I’d totally expected this to happen. Like I’d been a fraction as sure of his survival as I’d been telling everyone I was.

It was probably too late to fool anyone, after they’d seen my state when I’d run back into camp. Still. Had to try.

“Well,” I said calmly, “I’m going to bed.”

And then I walked calmly back to camp, not looking back. Cool girls don’t look at mindsplosions.

* * *

Charlie wasn’t sleeping. She probably thought I couldn’t tell the difference. She was lying down, eyes closed, breathing regular, forelimbs protectively wrapped around her bag full of Gth.

I repressed the urge to snatch the bag away.

The feeling growing in me was familiar, but nonsensical. It was pretty common among dohl. Hekln; that sense of vague threat and territoriality that came when one’s position of favour with the Queen was displaced by another dohl. It’s one of the first emotions a child learns to manage; squabbling dohl are a danger to the whole nest.

But there was no threat; there were no other dohl, and we weren’t with the Princess. Even when we did reach her, my position was in absolutely no danger; there were far too few dohl, we were both valuable. I might even be the only one left. Charlie was just an engineer; important, yes, but in very different ways. Her position had no overlap with mine.

I dismissed the feeling. A healthy next had no room for such nonsense. Our little team was already full of problems, I didn’t need to be one of them.

“Any results yet?” I asked Harlen.

“It needs to sit overnight,” was her reply.

“And then we’ll know if the water’s safe or not?”

“Then we’ll know whether or not it had any toxins that I can detect. I can’t detect everything. This planet could be full of dangerous chemicals I’ve never even conceived.”

“You were able to get us a safe food supply.”

“I was able to get us a food supply that hasn’t killed us yet,” Harlen corrected. “i can probably do the same for the water, with luck. But it needs to sit overnight.”

We sat in a tense circle, silent. Charlie gripped Glath a little tighter, still pretending to sleep. We couldn’t trust the drakes, and everyone knew it, which meant they probably didn’t trust us either. Banding together for survival alone in the sands had been one thing, but if we could reach the Princess…

Could we trust Harlen to be honest about the safety of the water?

“Whelp,” Kisa announced to the silent circle, “I’m bored. Game of Lies?”

“Me first!” Lln said. “I have a story that’ll fool all of you.”

“Lln, we’ve been in the same nest since you hatched,” I pointed out. “I think I have a pretty good idea of anything that’s ever happened to you.”

“We’ll see about that! Once upon a time, on the heart planet...”

* * *

The sun made its slow, laboured way over the horizon, pouring wine-red early light over the sands. Across said sands walked the only human on Sanctuary, step after step in a confident, steady pace. To her left, the crystal clear ocean crawled up the sand just a little way, then retreated again in slow, gentle waves. The beach wasn’t large; Sanctuary had no moon so the tides, at the whim of the sun alone, were small. Even the waves were small; the ocean was shallow, and the wind minimal.

To her left, the gentle ocean. To her right, her long shadow stretched over the root-strewn sands. But it wasn’t the only shadow about her; her long black cape moved not with the gentle morning breeze but of its own accord, and the shifting darkness of it appeared more a living shadow than solid material. From the sky, panning slowly in in a long establishing shot at the beginning of a movie, maybe with some cool music in the background, it would have looked fucking awesome.

I bet I looked fucking awesome.

Pity nobody was there to see it.

Now that Glath had had a bit of food and enough spiders to move, he was a bit more difficult to carry around. He didn’t seem to have anything that could be classified as real intelligence. So far as I could tell, his spiders sought out food, water, and each other, and that was about it. And there wasn’t enough of him to make a really cool Batmanesque coat; he drifted about me more like a dark lace train, spreading from the bag on my shoulders to the tasty vegetation on the ground. I didn’t bother trying to scoop him back up. So long as I had enough spiders in the bag to keep the others attached, they could do what they wanted, and there was no reason not to let them nip down and eat as we moved. Besides, it meant I didn’t have to search for more spiders myself; he’d just vaccuum up any we travelled over.

Harlen’s tests had revealed that the ocean was fairly corrosive, but otherwise contained nothing dangerous that she could find with her limited equipment. We wouldn’t be able to swim in it for any length of time and breathing the vapour for a long time might do a bit of lung damage that would take time to heal, but we should be okay in a boat, probably, unless there was something in there she couldn’t test for. Kit had decided to risk the journey; I’d been against it, but the aljik weren’t moving on the issue, and I’d decided that we were safe sticking together on the Lifeless Mystery Ocean than I’d be wandering the land alone, or with the two drakes. (Glath didn’t count. Besides, I was pretty sure that if we split up, Kit would try to take him.)

It was alright for the aljik, they didn’t seem to breathe. Or if they did, I had no idea how. Their exoskeletons couldn’t expand to pump air through lungs or anything.

We’d decided to wait another day and night to plan the trip and distil enough clean water. Once the distillery had finished its job, I was going to have to cannibalise it, the few scraps of escape pod hull we’d taken with us to form a shelter in case we encountered bad weather, and anything else non-absorbent I could find to make something that could float and keep all six of us plus Glath out of the corrosive water. Given that I was the smallest of the six, that was going to be a trial. And we’d need oars. And a rudder.

I had a basic plan for how to build it, but I couldn’t start until it was time to take the distillery apart. Later I’d have to get more jellyfish, too, but the sun would have to be much higher before I’d plunge into a freezing swamp. So I was taking one last long walk on the ground, appreciating how I could take off in pretty much direction without slipping and drowning in acid, and hoping that I could successfully build a boat. Shouldn’t be hard, right? I wasn’t going to even try to make sails or anything, but some oars, a rudder, a big floating bowl to stick them to… yeah, seemed simple enough.

I was sure that the fact that I knew nothing whatsoever about boats wouldn’t pose too big a problem.

* * *

We were probably all going to die.

I didn’t need the Queen or her dohl to tell me that. It was obvious in the fact that she only had one dohl left. She only had two of us tahl left, too; just me and Tak. I hoped some of my other sisters were alive out there somewhere, raising chaos. Or crushing chaos. Whatever needed to be done to chaos at that moment.

Anyway. There wasn’t much for us to fight at the nest, so Tak and I had been reduced to hauling loads for the atil, mostly.

“To the left, Gekt,” some atil told me. Yeah, yeah. I knew. I nudged the rock slightly left.

The view from the top of the observation tower was dizzying. It changed depending where you looked. To the West, Queen-sized rocks and chalky sands stretched downwards until they met the ocean. To the East, the rocky landscape went most of the way to the horizon, where it suddenly became the tree line of the drakes’ forest. Just North of the tower was a cliff; the ground vanished and somewhere far below was a big, black… something… that all of my senses told me to keep away from. And South was, of course, the tangle of sticks and mucous that made the nest itself.

Even the nest looked strange. Sticks should not be rubbery, smooth, and bright green.

“Do you see anything?” one of the atil asked. I growled at her. What I saw was an oncoming headache. Dealing with this much stuff at once was dohl work.

“Does it need to be any higher?” I asked.

“No. Higher would be dangerous.”

I climbed down the side of the tower. Like everything else, it was made of sticks, stones, and scrap metal, and the local sticks and stones weren’t great for building. We’d used carapace to shore up what we could, but we’d run out of dead aljik.

There was a steady stream of atil moving in and out of the main nest entrance. I ignored them as I marched in. They got out of my way, as I knew they would. Now, where would the Princess be…? She almost never went outside, the atil were working on the supply tunnels, she tended to avoid the quarters and birth chamber… storage, probably.

I moved through several air quality chambers, down a long corridor that contained multiple tahl guard posts even though me and Tak were the only tahl in the nest (without an engineer around to help, the atil could only tweak their tried-and-true designs so much), and dropped into the central storage chamber. The Princess was there, conferring with her single remaining dohl, Ain.

“Moving the signal to the top of the tower would give us a better range, Majesty,” Ain was saying. “But it would also put several more atil at risk. Our numbers are simply too low. And you need me up there as lookout anyway, so – ”

“You can’t go up there. It’s too dangerous. The atil will manage.”

“They’re not scouts, Majesty!”

“All they need to do is notice if anything approaches and alert us about it. They will be fine. What is it, Gekt?”

“Tower’s built, Majesty,” I said. “You want Tak and me to go knock around those drakes until they come home?”

Silence.

“Uh, no thank you, Gekt,” the Princess said. “There are probably more productive routes at our disposal.”

“It’d be easy,” I offered. “Nothing here to attack the nest so we can both go. They’re pretty squishy, and the girls can’t use their wings right. They have those big teeth but they can’t hurt me.” I tapped the thick carapace on one of my hindlimbs to make my point.

“Be that as it may, beating them up would only anger them.”

“Then we beat them up some more. We tell them, ‘we’ll stop beating you up when you come to the nest and do what your captain says.’ Then we have the drakes back.” I kept the impatience out of my tone. Princesses were so stupid sometimes.

The Princess and Ain looked at each other.

“What if they attack the base while you’re gone?” Ain asked. “Even with the lookout tower, you might not get back in time. I can’t hold all those drakes off by myself, Gekt.”

“Good point,” I conceded. “Also, we can’t have you in battle. There’s only one of you.”

The Princess fluttered her wings in agreement. “You must stay here and protect Ain and myself,” she said firmly. “When we are sure of our security, we can plan assaults.”

“Yes, Majesty.”

* * *

Charlie’s boat was no an impressive machine, compared to the spaceships that we were all used to. But since it was made from scrap metal, it was probably the best that we were going to get. It was basically an uneven mess of pod segments fixed together, as if our shelter had been upended and bits of our other equipment stuck to the sides to increase the floor space. It would barely fit the six of us. The whole thing had been covered in jellyfish skin for another layer of protection, as had our exposed flesh. Charlie and the drakes had had to cover their entire bodies, but the extra protection of jellyfish skin was nonexistent compared to aljik chitin; we only had to cover our more delicate joints.

“This is the rudder,” Charlie explained to me, showing how the handle directed a long fin that would go underwater. “It controls the direction of the boat better. The paddles, you have to push through the water to move forward, like this.” She showed me the motion.

“I understand,” I said. “So we need three people to control the boat at any given time?”

“Yes. If we have to stop, we have this anchor that should hold us in place. I think. I’m not sure what the currents are like, or how to calculate anything with them, so I’m kind of just hoping it’s heavy enough.”

I looked over my group. “Okay. Two teams. Lnn and Kisa will row with Charlie on rudder. Harlen and I will row with Kerlin on rudder. While one team rows, the other rests and prepares. We’ll set proper schedules when we’ve tested our endurance. Pack up what’s left and we head out.”

“Um,” charlie said, “shouldn’t we test it first?”

“Test it?”

“To make sure it works.”

“Well, you’re the engineer. Did you build it so that it would work?”

“Yes! Well, as best as I could. But I still think we should row along the beach for a bit. If there are problems, I want to find them before we’re away from shore.”

I clicked my mandibles. “Very well. If it’s necessary.” I gave her a long look. Was she stalling? Trying to avoid the Princess? Ready to betray us and…?

No. That was the hekln talking. I needed to hold together. I couldn’t destroy my own team by falling to suspicion. Charlie had always been unpredictable; she frequently did things that she wasn’t supposed to, but she’d never betrayed the nest.

Although she wasn’t bound by exchange like the traitorous drakes were supposed to be.

And hadn’t she been in the control ring, when the battle started? Gth had reserved room for her in an escape pod, waiting for her to return from the control ring. Why had an engineer been in the control ring?

No. None of this. There would be time to throw suspicion and blame and bad feelings around later, when we had the security of a nest. For now, there was rowing to do.

We packed the boat, pushed it into the water, and climbed in. Charlie’s team took the first shift, with Charlie feeling the rudder in her hands and moving it about. The atil quickly picked up a rowing rhythm.

“Hmm,” Charlie said one-handed, “rudder’s a bit harder to control than I thought it would be.”

“Will it be a problem?” I asked.

“No. Kerlin and I are both strong enough for it. The rowers will wear out before we do. Any leaks?”

“It seems to be holding,” I said. “I don’t think we’re moving very fast.”

“We’re not. Dammit.” Charlie chewed a lip. “It’s not enough rowers. We’re not going to be able to move the boat against those wavers like this. Maybe with four?”

“Four rowers means remaining motionless while they rest,” I pointed out. “Will your anchor work in deeper waters?”

“Depends how deep they are. Hmm. Okay, I have an idea. Let’s get to shore, and give me the paddles.”

We got to shore. Charlie pulled some metal off the boat, took the paddles, and made their submerged ends much wider.

“These’ll be much harder to use,” she said. “I don’t know if any of us are strong enough.”

“We will try. Lnn, Kisa.”

We piled back into the boat. The atil took the oars. Charlie took the rudder.

I could see the atil struggling to move the boat in the water, but they did it. Pull after pull, they did it. I watched them for a little while to estimate how far they’d be able to get us before needing a rest, then we swapped teams.

The paddle was as hard to use as it had looked, but I’m stronger than an atil. I could manage it. When Charlie was satisfied that the boat worked, Kerlin pulled the rudder to one side, and we headed out away from the firm sands that had been our home, and into the unknown, guided only by the ever-strengthening call of the nest.

* * *

Do you remember the Parable of the Child, void?

Well, of course you do not, because in no reality outside my fancy do you have the capacity to know, understand or remember anything. Or perhaps me claiming such a thing is arrogance – after all, can I fathom the connection between matter and thought? I cannot. Here I am, negating the very parable I am about to recall!

I remember the Parable of the Child. It was told to us all, as children, and we did not understand. And then we grew up, and we did. That is what growing up means.

A teacher goes to a child and says, “I have but one test for you, and if you can pass it, you will have surpassed my tutelage.”

The child says, “Elder, you have taught me to measure the heat of a star and the tilt of time, the movements of the tiniest of particles in the most crowded of gravity wells. Please give me your test.”

The teacher says, “The test is a simple enough calculation. I will give you three compositions of matter at a single point in time. You will analyse them, and tell me which two are the most similar to each other. I can provide you with a quick look at the forms, or a semicomplete data set, or if you really want it, the complete data for every particle at this point. What would you like?”

And the student, suspicious of a trap, says, “Please give me the complete data, that I can analyse it very thoroughly myself.”

So the teacher gives the data to the student. And the student analyses it. The student matches every atom to another, looks at their position and velocity in sample A, compared to sample B, compared to sample C. In the end, the difference is very obvious. The student goes to the teacher and says, “B and C are the most similar. They have almost identical composition, although many of the atoms have moved somewhat and B has a slightly lower mass. A is completely different.”

And the teacher says, “A good try, child, but you are wrong. A and C are the most similar.”

“But teacher,” the student protests, “I have run every analysis. B and C are so much more similar!”

“You still have much to learn,” the teacher says. “Should I show you the data you would have seen had you asked for just a quick peek?”

With the student’s consent the teacher reveals nothing but three simple images. Data set A is from a Gyrordian sand rat with long, black fur. Data set B and C are also Gyrordian sand rats; the same sand rat, in fact, with shorter, brown fur. The only difference is that B has had its throat cut and much of its blood is outside its body. It is not yet dead, but it will be very soon.

The teacher looks at the student and says, “Look again at your careful calculations of molecular composition. Do they truly tell you which sand rat is the odd one out?”

And the student looks and says hesitantly, “I see now that this strange molecular placement is an excretion of stress hormones, and I see where the blood is outside the skin. Perhaps I did not calculate thoroughly enough. Sorry, teacher.”

And it is with this statement that the teacher knows that the child has learned nothing.

I remember this story, Void, from my own childhood. I think we all do. They say that you are grown when you understand it, and I do… or at least, I did. But I feel that I don’t, any more.

As a child, I would think, ‘the student is wise; their calculations were not thorough enough’.

As I grew, I thought, ‘the teacher is wise; the calculations obscure the truth, and even if the student did find the signs of death in them, the calculations would not tell the essence of the issue, but merely allow the student to infer it beyond them.’

But now I wonder further. I wonder, ‘Are they not both right and both wrong? Because the issue is not with the calculation. It is with a disagreement on the term ‘similar’. The whole parable is built on a semantic misunderstanding, and with it, perhaps our whole understanding of nature – what does it even mean for something to be similar, or different? How can we be said to have any knowledge at all?

I don’t remember a parable for this part.


	5. A-Sailing We Shall Go

Things seemed to be going well. The waves were low and gentle even as the shore disappeared behind us, and the call of the nest grew stronger and stronger as I rowed. There had been a couple of reasons why I’d split up the teams as I had, putting the drakes with myself and the atil with Charlie. The main reason was that I thought charlie and Kerlin were the least likely to be able to take the strain of the oars for long, so they made obvious choices for the rudder, but there was also the fact that I still didn’t entirely trust the drakes. I wouldn’t put it past them to sabotage us and pull us off-course. I wanted aljik in both shifts.

Besides, only we aljik could hear the nest call. It sounded so close, as if I should be able to turn around and see it, but there was nothing out there. The water must carry the sound really well. Who knew how far we’d have to row?

Harlen was starting to flag on her oar. “Shift change,” I called. I prodded Kisa – the boat was cramped, and the off shift were sleeping under our feet. As atil tended to do, she was up immediately, and took the oar from me.

Humans wake slower. Charlie groaned and pushed Kerlin away. He prodded her again and she sat up wearily, blinking and… panting? How long had she been panting? Was that normal for humans?

“Are you alright, Charlie?” I asked.

“Yeah, probably. Let’s do this.” She crawled into place and braced herself against the rudder. “Let’s go, girls. Let’s chase that sunrise.”

* * *

We’d been rowing all night.

Well, I hadn’t been rowing. I’d been on the rudder. So I didn’t have it as bad as some of the team. And I hadn’t been there all night; the shifts were determined by rower endurance and seemed to be about an hour long. Ever tried to do on-and-off hour-long shifts for a whole day? We weren’t moving very fast, either; aljik don’t have the endurance of humans, no matter how much physical power they had, and drakes are even worse. After a few shifts, everyone was too tired to really go fast.

I say that as if I was doing any better. I wasn’t. One hour isn’t enough time to get any useful amount of sleep. I wouldn’t be able to do this for more than a few days; I was already worn out just on the rudder. I couldn’t focus, could barely see, and didn’t seem to be able to get enough air.

It was as the sun was rising, when Kit asked if I was okay, that it occurred to me that that was a bit strange. I’d never been so tired I felt like I was suffocating before. But Harlen had said the water was fine, right? Probably. Best she could tell. With her very limited equipment.

Fuck.

I tried to look like I was fine. I had no idea what I was breathing in, but it hadn’t killed me yet, and turning back to wander the desert would eventually mean death. Besides, we were probably more than halfway across the ocean. Who knew?

If Glath were properly with us, he could probably fly over and find out. But he was still a useless bag of barely-coherent spiders.

I felt vaguely sick. It was a familiar kind of sick. Like I wasn’t getting enough air. Maybe there wasn’t enough oxygen? I squinted at my own fingernails, trying to tell in the early light whether the nail beds were bluish. It was impossible to tell.

“Charlie,” Harlen said, “Are you okay?”

‘Fine,” I lied. “Just tired.” My head hurt. “You know humans work best with long stretches of sleep.”

“Will it kill you?” Kit asked.

“Not in the short term, no. If we’re out here a week or so I’m gonna need to sleep properly.”

Kit wasn’t buying it. “Harlen, what’s wrong with her?”

“I don’t know! I told, you everything I could detect in the water should be fine. If it’s doing something to the air then it’s reacting with something I don’t know about.”

“Well, what should be in the air?”

“Just standard oxygen atmosphere chemicals! Oxygen, carbon dioxide...”

“Wait,” I said. The breathing, the drowsiness… I’d read about this. “How much carbon dioxide?”

“About four parts in five hundred.”

That was high. WAY too high. Deadly? No idea. Maybe not. I wasn’t dead yet.

“Yeah,” I said as confidently as I could, trying not to slur my hand gestures. “I’ll be fine.”

“Don’t lie about this,” Kit snapped. “You’re indispensible.”

“Well, what do you think we should do about it?”

“Turn back,” Harlen said immediately.

“If we don’t make it to the nest – ”

“I think we’re more than halfway,” Kerlin said. “The waves are mostly moving the other way.”

“Wind might have changed,” Harlen mumbled. “Are you keeping track of it? I wasn’t.”

“We press on,” Kit said. “Charlie, can you – ”

“I’m a little drowsy, I can still steer a damn boat,’ I snapped, gripping the rudder.

“Very well. Wake us when you have to.”

The other shift settled down to sleep. We’d been blown a little off-course during our conversation; I turned us back to face the sun. The rudder felt stiff and unresponsive in my hand – I was even weaker than I’d thought. The atil, still a bit weak from their own lack of rest, did their best to make headway, but we were moving slower than we had the previous day.

The carbon dioxide wouldn’t kill me, at least not directly, but looking back, I think it had a pretty big impact on events. If I wasn’t so tired, maybe I would’ve remembered that aljik sleep schedules don’t work like human ones, and the atil shouldn’t be having quite so much trouble at the oars as they seemed to be having. If I wasn’t feeling weak, maybe I would’ve paid a lot more attention to the resistance of the oar, instead of blaming my own muscles. Maybe I would’ve realised that something was wrong before it was too late.

Oh, what a different world that would be.

* * *

The Rainbow Destroyer’s last battle had been against the Stardancer, flagship of the Rogue Princess. The Rainbow Destroyer had successfully cut the Stardancer in half and victory had seemed assured but somehow, through some combination of luck, surprise and frankly completely insane tactics, the Stardancer had prevailed, and the surviving crew of the Rainbow Destroyer brought aboard the Stardancer and executed.

All except one. Nelan, engineer of the Rainbow Destroyer, had survived by hiding away until the Rainbow Destroyer was set adrift. He had used his skills to keep the ruined husk of the ship limping along, tailing the Stardancer to mark its location until reinforcements could arrive, constantly risking notice and immediate destruction.

So he was not particularly happy to be summoned aboard the ruined husk of the Stardancer.

The Stardancer was barely recogniseable as even the ruins of a ship any more. It must have been a chore even to get the wreckage into the hold without completely destroying it. The green dash had simply evaporated most of the ship, and even the part protected by the remaining shields was burned and torn to jagged shreds. With imagination, the skeleton of the ship was sort of discernible, but identifying most of the remaining scrap came down to looking at the blueprints and guessing. A few fragments of what might be bone or chitin were the only unusual things in the wreckage.

“Why… why am I here, my Queen?” Nelan asked nervously.

Queen Tatik strode forward, a twitch of a wing carapace signalling her guardian tahl to remain in position. She bent to match her eyes with Nelan’s.

“Because you were there,” she said simply. “I have had dozens of engineers look over this, but they don’t have your context. You saw the ship before the dash; you followed it for crests, you had a far better idea of its layout than anybody n the battle.”

“They have the blueprints – ”

“Of a complete ship, yes. But you saw it in operation, as it was before the battle. You may have insight. I need to find my sister, Nelan. I need to find the remains of the rogue Princess.”

“Either there are remains or there are not, Majesty. I saw some remains that might be aljik, but if she was in the control ring...”

“There must be remains!” Queen Tatik flared her wings and reared. Nelan shrank back. “If there are remains, it is imperative that we find them, do you understand? There should be something, there should be… there will be something.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Majesty. The metal of the hull couldn’t withstand the dash. Mere flesh stood no chance.”

“I have no interest in flesh!”

“But… you said you wanted...”

“I need to know exactly where she perished. That is enough.”

“It would… it would help if I knew what I was looking for, Majesty.”

Tatik hesitated. She flicked a forelimb, and the tahl left the room, leaving Nelan and Tatik alone in the vast hold.

“I suppose,” she said quietly, “with the rogue dead, it is no longer a problem. Nevertheless, you are sworn to secrecy, on pain of exile in life and death, understand?”

“I understand, Majesty.”

So she told him.

Without protest, he searched the whole wreckage again, harder this time.

He found nothing.

* * *

The shore was in sight!

I shook off my drowsiness as best I could and shook the next shift awake. “Kit, Kerlin, Harlen – get up! We’re almost there!”

Kit sprang into action and stared over the water. “Yes! A few more shifts and we’ll be there! To the oars, Harlen!” He grabbed an oar.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m awake,” Harlen grumbled, grabbing her own.

I laid back on the uneven bottom of our boat, trying to will myself to sleep. The drowsiness helped, but I just couldn’t seem to tamp down the excitement of seeing the shore. Soon, we’d be off this awful boat, off having to ration our water, off breathing caustic air over a caustic sea. Soon, I could walk with sand under my feet again. Get back to my crew again. Take stock, see who was alive and who wasn’t. Make a plan to get back up in space again, and then… something.

But for the moment, something wet was burning my cheek and eye. I sat up.

“Guys, is the boat leaking?”

It was leaking. The small puddle of water in the bottom of the boat started slowly to deepen. Cuts and scratches on my hands burned as I ran them over the boat, trying to identify where the leak was. Harlen and Lln had much less sensitive digits than I did, but tried to help, while Kerlin kept control of the rudder, and Kit and Kisa bailed with empty water containers. We kept getting in each others’ way, but there was no time to organise.

It wasn’t good news. The first leak I found was far too small to be responsible for the water we were taking on, so I kept looking. We found another. And another. The boat was basically a sieve, and as we searched, we started taking on water faster.

Harlen and Kit took to the oars while the atil and I shifted to bailing. The exertion and the air together were making me feel woozy, but there was no time to get my bearings. I knew we couldn’t make it; there was no way we could keep up the pace until we got to shore. It was too far. There was something… muzzy… in my head. No; a sound. A deep sound, on the very edge of my hearing, like a strange new pressure against my brain. I tried to ignore it.

The water, I realised, wasn’t nearly as clear as it had looked when we began our journey. There was some kind of green scum in it. Algae or something. Or an alien life form a lot like it, anyway. It clung to my fingers as I bailed water. But… but if a large volume of water looked clear, then a much smaller volume should…

I looked over the side. The bottom of the boat was thickly coated in a green, living carpet. The algae leaking into the boat coated not just me, but the drakes and the inside of the boat itself. The aljiks’ joints were collecting their own colonies of algae. Harlen had stopped rowing to look at her own tails with interest.

“Harlen!” Kit snapped. “Focus!”

“It’s the jellyfish skins!” she said as she grabbed the oar again. “They’re eating them, I think. Or destroying them, anyway.”

We’d coated our exposed flesh in jellyfish skins as extra protection before taking to the ocean, and I’d used them to waterproof the boat. If they were stripping our waterproofing away…

“We’re not going to make it,” I said, shaking my head.

“Do you have a better plan?” Kit snapped.

“If I did, I would’ve shared it by now!”

“Then keep bailing!”

With our protection being eaten away, the water became more painful. Scrapes and rashes on my legs that I’d forgotten about burned anew in the acidic water. The boat jolted; something in its structure – I couldn’t see what – gave way.

The boat broke in half.

I fell into the water, gasping for breath. With the carbon dioxide levels so hig, I had no idea whether I was actually drowning or not; I couldn’t tell how much oxygen I needed. The wooziness made it difficult to keep my bearings and my entire body burned. I flailed about until my hand struck a piece of wreckage, gripped it, and dragged myself out of the water. Moments later I lay, gasping, on a ruined piece of escape pod hull. It was upside down, by which I mean it was the right way up.

Okay, I explained that poorly. The piece of hull was like a big bowl. When it was part of an escape pod, the curved part had faced upward; when it was part of a boat, the curved part had obviously faced downward. Now it was back to facing upward, with me lying on the curved top. The only thing keeping it afloat was a large bubble of air trapped under the dome; if that leaked out, my liferaft would sink far faster than I could do anything about it. So I had to be careful not to rock or tip it in a way that would let that happen.

Staying as still as I could, I glanced around. My crewmates were struggling up onto their own pieces of wreckage, but none of us had oars and we were too spread out to effectively communicate. I looked around but found nothing I could steer the liferaft with. Either the wind and waves would get us to shore before we died, or it wouldn’t.

Keeping as still and well-balanced on my makeshift raft as I could, I let the weariness overwhelm me. I was dizzy with the pain of the acidic water and the hot sun, weary from the sudden life-or-death struggle and several days of barely any sleep, woozy from the air and quite probably dehydration. There was nothing else that any of us could do but wait.

We were at the mercy of the tides.

* * *

I wish that I could tell you of my garden, void.

Truly, I do. I would tell you of the comings and goings of all of my little subjects, of the patterns they made in their behaviour, of the ways they thought… but I cannot. My time tending my garden was fascinating, but I cannot pin down any fascinating thing to tell you about it.

This is the way of us, is it not? We see that we cannot measure the universe and so we go out to be awed by it, thinking ourselves oh so wise in our acceptance of its vast unreadability. We go out and we tell each other that it was amazing and majestic and awe-inspiring and if anybody asks, specifically, what that is supposed to mean, we chastise their foolish, unenlightened ways.

Perhaps the fool in the Parable of the Child is not the student, who believes that they can measure the universe. Perhaps it is not even the teacher, who believes their own perspective to be some kind of impartial arbitration. Perhaps it is the listener, who passively listens to a story that reinforces their own view, and unthinkingly calls it wisdom.

We are so afraid to have a wrong or unsupportable perspective, that we grow to fear having a perspective at all. We are so afraid to observe a pattern and write a biased narrative, that we write no narrative; we observe everything as disconnected, random events and call ourselves unbiased, and therefore wise. We find intelligence to be imperfect, so we turn our backs on it altogether.

That is not enlightenment. It is cowardice.

What frustrating beings we must be. What useless cowards, to see that something is impossible, and somehow make the logical leap that it therefore should not be tried. The impossibility of understanding should not be an excuse – after all, that impossibility is, in itself, unprovable. Only its negative could be provable, so why do we take it as read? And why should it matter? Since when has something being impossible been a reason not to do it? With an attitude like that, no new skill would be learned at all!

I look back on my time tending my garden, void, and I do not see the awe-inspiring experience that I wish to see. I see a colossal waste of time. What did I do, other than provide some minor material benefit and save everybody;s lives every now and then? What did I do that was actually important? What did I learn? I cannot tell you of my garden, void, so it may as well have never existed.

We go out to have an experience, we are inspired, we leave our experiences behind forever, and we tuck those memories away where they cannot be tainted by something as crass as actual thought or analysis. It is all self-congratulatory nonsense.

I will tell you of my garden, void. I will tell you of it in such amazing detail that you will be able to recreate it in your probably-nonexistent mind.

But first I need to go and find it, so that I know what to tell you.

* * *

I jerked awake to burning lungs and skin. My eyes flew open and immediately started burning as well. I tried to scream, breathed in water, panicked.

I wish that I could tell you that I had the wherewithal to save myself; that I calmly conserved what oxygen I had, used the light on my eyelids to determine which way was up, and kicked towards the surface. Turns out, that sort of thing doesn’t happen when you suddenly jerk awake while drowning in acid. Hell, when I wake up under normal circumstances it takes me a bit of time to remember not to walk into walls. What saved me was an aljik claw pulling on my hair, dragging me out of the water and onto the sand.

I coughed, threw up, and screamed a bit, but I didn’t have the energy for a proper freakout. I blinked furiously, trying to clear my eyes; my head was tipped back and clean water poured over them. I struggled against this treatment, and managed to pull away – my rescuer was as exhausted as I was – but once I realised what was going on, I stopped fighting.

After a minute, I could see. Kit stood over me, looking haggard and concerned, or as haggard and concerned as a dohl can look. Expressions for someone covered mostly in chitin and facial gems are kind of a whole-body thing, and I could mostly see a mass of gelatinous eyes. The eyes themselves could have looked better.

“Are you alright?” I asked him, wincing at the pain in my muscles and throat as I spoke.

“I will probably survive. You?”

“Yeah, same.” I stood up and stubbornly refused to fall over. The maddening deep sound was still on the edge of my hearing. The fresh air was comfortable in my lungs for the first time in days, and it was helping me think much more clearly. I didn’t think I was that badly hurt. It was impossible to be sure, but my skin all seemed to be there – it looked like the water had burned my multiple grazes and rashes without doing any obvious damage. It was probably in my blood or something for all I knew (I didn’t know how that sort of thing worked), but if that was going to kill me it probably already would have. I guessed. Man, I missed my textbooks. My vision wasn’t completely clear, but my eyes should heal. The gelatinous covering on human eyes is pretty good at doing that, and I felt like if anything else had been damaged it would be pretty obvious. If not, I guessed I’d find out soon enough. My lungs… well, nothing to be done about that. If they were damaged, they’d heal or they wouldn’t. I didn’t think they’d get any worse, and they were supporting me just fine for the moment.

I felt like my insides were made of broken toothpicks and jelly, of course, but that was probably just all the exhaustion and nearly drowning.

Kit looked, at first glance, pretty much intact except for some eye damage. This meant absolutely nothing, since most of what was visible of him was near-indestructible chitin. I was pretty worried about his eyes; a big red one had popped and was dribbling goo down the side of his face, his shiny compound eyes were looking far less shiny than they normally did, and several of the blobby gelatinous ones looked pitted. But he had been able to see well enough to save me, so he clearly wasn’t blind.

His stance suggested more than just eye damage. I already knew he was weak, and he seemed to be trembling a little, having trouble holding himself up. Aljik usually kept their wings tucked away beneath their protective carapaces, only fluttering them every few minutes or so, but Kit’s wing carapaces were raised, exposing the delicate membranes within to the air. He moved them slowly. Normally, a fluttering of the dozens of fine gossamer layers produced a golden haze, but Kit’s were torn, ragged and in some cases stuck together. Moving them at all was obviously agonizing.

“Where are the others?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “The nest is that way.” He pointed Northeast.

The sand beneath our feet was not the gritty red affair we’d spent so long wandering over. It was chalky, and full of large, grey fragments of rock. It rose at a gentle incline for about half a day’s walk before stopping abruptly; a hill. Or mountain. I wasn’t sure how big a hill had to be before it became a mountain.

“How far to the nest itself?”

“Hard to say. Half a day, perhaps? I can’t account for terrain changes.” He handed me a small container of water. “There is no further need to ration this. Drink. We will rest to regain enough strength for the journey, then head out.”

I nodded and drank. Already I was feeling stronger; my several unconscious hours on the acid sea had done me good, apparently. In terms of exhaustion, at least. Everything still hurt, but my muscles felt better able to support my weight with every step as I paced back and forth, carefully sipping water.

The buzz in my ears wouldn’t fade, but my vision was clearing moment by moment. I cast an eye down the beach. It was midmorning, and the sun seemed painfully bright, glaring off the water and the chalky white sand. The beach wasn’t as straight on this side as it had been on the other; to both the left and the right, it twisted out of view behind hills quite quickly.

My little liferaft bobbed on the waves not too far away. As soon as I laid eyes on it, a horrible thought occurred to me. I pulled my makeshift bag off my shoulders, noticing that even to my still-trembling muscles, it seemed unnaturally light. There was no bulk to it. I opened it.

Four very wet spiders lay at the bottom of the bag, still as death.

“Glath!” I screamed, charging back toward the water. But Kit was too fast for me; suddenly I was on the ground, pinned against the uncomfortably pointy rocks by the full body weight of an injured dohl.

“Are you trying to die?!” he snapped.

“Glath fell out of his bag,” I gasped. “I just need… I’ll make another boat, I’ll...”

“How? How exactly do you plan on doing anything out there without getting yourself killed, Charlie? When will you get it into your head that your are not dispensable? The nest needs you here and now! Gth’s gone! Move on!”

He was right; I couldn’t venture back onto the ocean without getting myself killed. Feeling like an idiot, I stopped struggling. Kit let me up.

“Sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking.” I shook my head, trying to free it of the persistent buzz that seemed to be coming from all around, and squinted at the ground, overturning small surface rocks with my toe.

“Now what are you doing?” Kit asked.

“Looking for Glath,” I explained patiently, moving along the shore a couple of paces.

“The nest is in the other direction,” Kit pointed out.

“Which means I’ll be able to cover that territory when we go there, but I don’t know if we’ll be back here again. Go on without me.”

“Charlie, this is irrational.”

“No, it isn’t,” I insisted to both of us. “I had barely a fraction of him last time. There’s still plenty left. I don’t need to find the same spiders; I can find new spiders, and when I have enough – ”

“We are a very long way from your crash site. What makes you think any of him got this far?”

“What makes you think he didn’t? Stuff can get blown around a lot. There might be enough here. Do you think the others would’ve landed closer or father from the nest than us?”

“What? It doesn’t matter. They can hear the call of the nest. If Gth got blown out here, he will be mostly in the ocean. He will already be dead.”

“His spiders can survive the ocean,” I pointed out. “Remember? I fished some of them out of it on the other side. And we know they survived, because they’re the ones who gave him enough mass to start moving about. Also, the drakes can’t hear the nest.”

“The drakes are smart, they can take care of themselves. It’s been days since you fished those spiders out. Just because they managed to survive that long doesn’t mean any of them are still alive out there. Besides, you have no way to collect them.”

“One problem at a time. Shore first. Then I’ll think of something.”

“And if you do collect that many again, so what? Do you think a sorry clawspan of spiders will bring Gth back?”

“I’ll think of something! He can… he can grow back! Recover!”

“An ambassador colony’s mind is in the connections between its members,” Kit pointed out. “Even if you collected that many, even if you let them breed up to full size, you wouldn’t have Gth back. You’d have somebody with such extensive brain damage and memory loss that they’d be a whole new ambassador, even if they recovered at all. I don’t know if they can recover from damage that extensive. Just how big a fraction of him do you realistically expect to find?”

“What is wrong with you?!” I snapped. “Do you have any idea how fucking creepy your practicality is? Everyone’s just an asset to you, aren’t they? It’s all a fucking numbers game. That’s why you pulled me out of the water but don’t seem to give a shit about the drakes or the atil; I’m just too fucking valuable to the nest and they’re replaceable. Do you seriously not give a shit about anybody but yourself?”

“I am trying to get some fragment of this nest off this planet alive!” he growled. “And to be honest, I have absolutely no idea how to fucking do that! I can barely breathe, I don’t know what condition the nest is in, if the Queen gets any hint we might still be alive she’ll destroy us from space, we have no materials to work with, and the closest thing we have to an engineer is from a non-spacefaring planet! Yes, I’m being practical! And if any of us are going to survive, you should, too! The past can’t help or hurt us, but the future sure can!”

“I won’t give up on my friends!” I growled. “Including Glath!”

“You’re not the only one who loved him, Charlie! We were closer than I’d ever been with anyone in my life, until you stole him!”

We were both silent for several seconds.

“That wasn’t fair,” I said, more calmly than I felt.

“I know,” Kit said, equally calmly. “I apologise. Glath’s decisions were his own. They’re not your fault. But you barely knew him, and I knew him all my life. We grew up together, we became who we are together. I followed him to the Stardancer and the Rogue Princess. If you think it’s hard for you to let him go, try to imagine how I feel.”

More silence.

“I thought… I thought he followed you out here,” I said weakly.

Kit flicked a mandible in the aljik equivalent of a headshake. “He wanted to go,” he said. “The Princess was… her plan did not inspire confidence in the smarter castes. We knew better than to throw away our comfortable futures under the steady, sensible rule of Atil to follow a reckless element like Ha – like the Princess. But you could see in Gth’s every movement, clear as day, that he couldn’t stand hanging around Court any more. The Princess was offering something he desperately needed, but we all knew – we dohl, that is, or at least the handful of us that Gth used as templates – that there was no way he’d go out there alone. I didn’t have a particularly strong opinion on the politics of the matter, so I went with the rogue, and he followed me. I uprooted my entire life and marched off to near-certain death to give him the opportunity to do the same. He found what he was looking for in you, I suppose.”

I looked away. “I don’t… I never wanted to come between you two.”

“You never did. He’ll always be one of my best friends, and if there was the slightest fragment of hope that he might be alive, I’d be putting my whole being into rescuing him. But he’s gone, and we have far more people to worry about than an ambassador colony, a pair of atil and a couple of alien traitors.”

I shook my head. “No, we don’t. They’re ours, and I’m going to find them.”

“You know, for an engineer, you are dangerously irrational.”

“I’m a big, unpredictable, dangerous human. Gotta keep up the stereotype!”

“Of what, grounding the flagships of our rulers and getting untold numbers of aljik killed? I think the drakes beat you to that one, but if we get everyone up in the sky again you’ll have another shot. Come on, nest is this way.”

I shook my head. “I’m going to search, while we’re out here. We can search the beach on the way to the nest later.”

“We cannot afford to – ”

“To what, Kit? Find and potentially rescue our crewmates? You think life is oh-so-hard for you, Kit? How the fuck do you think I feel? You had a choice to go on this stupid death adventure! You were asked, and you and your best friend took the risk, and you’re still among your own kind – fuck, you just can’t wait to get back to them! I was never asked, Kit. I woke up one morning on a fucking spaceship full of actual fucking aliens, which by the way I’d never even believed existed! Somewhat of a shock, I can tell you. You’re dreaming of a successful revolution, of putting your Princess on the throne and your universe going back to normal – well, I don’t have that fucking luxury. Even if we get off this planet, I’m still trapped. Forever. Assuming I’m not executed the moment I’m no longer vital, which is actually pretty likely if the rest of the Empire is as shitscared of my kind as you lot were at first. The best case scenario of me is still permanent exile from anything I’ve ever known or loved. The only thing I have left of home, the only scrap of my old life, is this!” I pulled my broken phone out of my toolbelt. Seawater dripped out of it.

“Do you have any idea what it’s like for a human to be alone, Kit? Probably the same as a dohl being alone, I’d imagine. We’re not as structured as you lot but we’re a very social species. And the only people around are the people who fucking abducted me in the first place. You think I’ve forgiven you guys for that? You think that’s just water under the bridge? Well, you know what, Kit? It is! I had to! I had no choice; it was the only way to fucking survive! I would’ve liked the opportunity to have some kind of personal boundaries or standard in the way I was gonna let people treat me, but no; you’re all I have, so that was taken away from me! Fuck, it took everything in my power just to make you bastards even see me as a person! But hey, humans are good at this. We’re so fucking socially ADAPTABLE!”

My own heavy breathing was making me lightheaded. I forced myself to slow down.

“So I did everything in my fucking power to survive,” I said, more slowly. “I gave myself little goals. Little projects. ‘Be valuable enough to stay alive.’ ‘Try to get the crew to acknowledge you as an actual person.’ ‘Find a way to communicate.’ Day by day, I survived, I built new relationships and a new social system with the people who, if there was any justice in the fucking universe, I should be free to hate with every cell in my fucking body. And then they kept. Fucking. Dying. All of my friends keep being torn from my life, and I have to build new relationships all over again, and it… it makes it feel like nothing is real, you know? All I’m ever doing is playing social catch-up, trying to keep ahead of the wall of death. Nobody was closer to me than Glath and Tyzyth, and now they’re both… they’re both… and do you know what good friends I have left from my time on the Stardancer? Lln and Kerlin, who are probably drowned by now, and who you seem to think aren’t worth a fucking rescue if they’re not. If I were you, Kit, I’d be looking warily over my shoulder a lot, or whatever aljik do instead of that. We’ve had too many friendly conversations recently, I bet a meteor is gonna drop out of the fucking sky and kill you any second.

“So no, I will not let go. I will not accept the inevitable, I will not be practical. I am going to walk down this beach and look for survivors, and I am going to inspect the ground for spiders as I go, and every spider I find is going into the fucking spider bag. The rest of the crew is just going to have to fucking wait for me, because I refuse to accept this kind of bullshit from the universe. This goes no further. These friends I have, these total arseholes, this is where everything stops. I will not fucking give up on a single one of them until I see an actual corpse. Or millions of corpses, in Glath’s case. You go on ahead, I’ll meet you at the nest later.”

I plodded down the beach. Kit followed. I looked at him in surprise.

“You can’t find the nest without me,” he pointed out.

“You already told me which direction it is. My sense of direction isn’t that bad.”

“Fair enough. Still, you only have two eyes.”

“What does that have to do with – ”

“I might be able to see some spiders that you miss,” he said, fixing his gaze to the ground.


	6. Home

We found an unconscious Kerlin not too far from where Kit had dragged me out of the water. He was lying half in the water, but through some miracle, his face was out of the water. I dashed over and put a hand to his side to check if he was breathing.

Scaly skin under my hand slid free of his body. I shrank away. After a few moments of panic, I realised that there was no blood and reached out to touch him again. Under the broken, slipping skin was fresh skin – I’d forgotten that male aljik shed their skin.

I gripped him under the wings and tried to drag him out of the water. Kit loaned his strength to the effort, and we were able to pull him up onto the bank.

“Is he okay?” Harlen asked, walking up the beach toward us with Lln in tow.

“I can’t tell,” I admitted. “He’s breathing. Where’s Kisa?”

“No idea. We’ve walked up from way down South and didn’t see her.”

“Let’s head back up North, then,” Kit suggested. “Can anyone wake Kerlin?”

I slapped Kerlin in the face as hard as I could. Nothing happened, except that I hurt my hand. I shrugged.

“I’ll wait with him,” Harlen said. “You guys should go on to the nest.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Kit said quickly.

“Kisa might need your help further up the beach,” Harlen pointed out.

Kit hesitated. I looked between the pair, then at Lln, who avoided my gaze.

“I’ll go ahead with Lln,” I announced. “You guys can catch us up when you decide what you’re doing.” I strode off without waiting for a response. Lln matched my pace.

Once we were out of sight and the others wouldn’t be able to read my gestures, I said, “Lln, what the fuck is going on?”

“Well, we are nearing the nest and soon we will be able to see – ”

“Not that. The… aljik and drake tension thing. I swear we all trusted each other a lot more on the Stardancer. Now everyone’s suddenly at each other’s throats, calling traitor. I get that everyone’s jumpy that one of the aljik pilots brought us here, but come on, Harlen’s not even a pilot.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t know about any of that,” Lln said coyly. “I’ll just be relieved to get back to the nest. You’d want to ask Kit or Ain or the Princess about that sort of thing.”

I glanced about to confirm that we were alone. “Lln, we’re friends, right?”

“Of course.”

“Then just with each other, while we’re alone, can we cut the bullshit? I’m running out of friends. They keep dying. I’d like to get some of them, and myself for that matter, through all this alive. I’m not an idiot – I know you’re not as naive as you make out. You asked me what side I was on once. You go all over the ship, or nest I guess, and see everything, and I know you have a good memory.”

“Charlie, I’m flattered by your faith in me but I mostly just follow orders.”

I took a couple of breaths, considered the situation, and decided, ‘fuck it’. “I’m sure you do, but I don’t for a second believe that you don’t know what’s going on at all times. It’s the opposite of me. I never have a clue what the fuck is going on. People expect me to be a genius engineer, but the truth is, without my textbooks you’re probably a better engineer than I am. People expect me to use my vital skills to be a big political player but I don’t have any context for the politics in place and nobody will explain them to me. And soon we’re both going to be back under the wise, restrained, and not-at-all-suicidally-crazy leadership of Captain Nemo, and before that happens I would very much like to figure out what the fuck is going on so I have a better grip on what kind of pointless and potentially fatal bullshit we’re gonna be thrown into next. Any tips?”

Lln hesitated. She glanced down the beach, checking that the others hadn’t come back into sight. “The problem is the drakes.”

“No fucking shit. What’s wrong with the drakes?”

“They’re not going to want to leave.”

I blinked. “What? Leaving is the point. Somehow I don’t think they’re going to want to be trapped on this planet for the rest of their lives any more than we do.”

“No, they do. That is the point. It’s the issue of the exchange we made with them. It’s all very complicated.”

“Complicated?”

“The situation aboard the Stardancer is… was… very tenuous. Nonaljik who serve a Court are generally bound by an exchange of goods or services to… set the value of their loyalty. Gth’s presence among us allowed a lot of cooperation with non-aljik, even before you taught us to speak to each other, but the loyatlies were not always concrete. You refused your exchange, and the Princess kept you around anyway out of desperation. Technically, you’re a rogue element, or you were before the taking of our flesh. The ketestri couldn’t be offered an exchange as we couldn’t communicate, the Kohrir were simply never woken up after we took the ship… the only parties actually bound by exchange on the ship were the haltig, who are probably dead, and the drakes.”

“Okay, the drakes are hired crew,” I said, nodding. “So what’s the problem, Captain Nemo behind on her payments?”

“Not really. It is more the nature of the exchange and some… disagreement over certain terms. I’m not sure of the details, but I believe that the general intent of the agreement is that the drakes would serve the rogue Princess until certain conditions were met, and in exchange she would find and ferry them to a suitable planet for colonisation.”

“They’re colonists.”

“Yes. Their intent was always to find a livable planet, plant new core trees, and establish their species on it. This was supposed to happen after their service to the Stardancer ended, but certain conditions took far longer to meet than expected. The drakes were starting to get very restless; they felt that the Princess was exploiting them and hadn’t played fair. The Court felt that the drakes had agreed to very explicit terms and were trying to cheat by leaving early. And now...”

“Now they’ve taken the plunge and violated their contract to bring us all to this nice little coloniseable planet,” I finished.

“Yes. And I do not think we will be able to leave without them, so this decision effectively dooms the nest unless we can change their minds.”

Well, fuck. Apparently my little impulse decision to take the Stardancer out here had created a political problem I’d been completely unaware of. The whole thing was my decision, it had nothing to do with their internal politics, but it was easy to see how the aljik – even the other drakes, probably – would assume that us ending up here was effectively a declaration of mutiny from the drakes, and only Kerlin and I knew…

Kerlin, who had stood at those controls and seen me intentionally lie about the Princess’ orders. Kerlin, who had been in control of the ship while the perfect opportunity to get his people out of a bad deal had stood in front of him in the form of countless aljik warships and one stupid human. There had been a mutiny, hadn’t there? Kerlin knew I’d been lying about the Princess’ orders. He’d taken an opportunity and went for it, not necessarily because he trusted me, but because it was for his own benefit. Would he have done something like this even if I hadn’t been there? He certainly seemed to plan everything out very quickly.

I had of course given him the perfect scapegoat, if he were caught. If he were caught, he could simply say, ‘I don’t know what you mean, Princess; Charlie translated your order and told me to take us to the nearest planet with a breathable atmosphere. It’s all a big misunderstanding based on some obscure human plan.’ Was that the plan? Would he sell me out?

No, of course not. No need to get paranoid. I could trust my friends. Our goals had aligned and we’d worked together to reach them; nothing weird about that. Happened all the time. I’d lied to him and taken the ship here for my own reasons; it wasn’t fair for me to be mad at him for essentially the same thing.

I needed to focus on the situation as it was in the present.

“So,” I said, “the aljik want to go and the drakes probably want to stay. Everyone is pissed because the drakes dragged us to this planet and got a shitload of people killed, but we need their help to have any chance of getting back into space. Yet there’s basically no way to convince them to go back up since this is what they wanted in the first place, so the aljik have to try to get them to honour their contract, and this is why Kit’s all nervous about Harlen and Kerlin and why they’re super reluctant to come to the nest.”

“Probably,” Lln said. “I only know what Kit says. Perhaps things are different at the nest, and everyone is getting along very well.”

“Uh-huh. And maybe they’ll have a shiny new spaceship all built and ready to fly when we get there, and an all-you-can-eat sundae bar.”

* * *

I admit to some relief when the human strode up to the nest with an atil in tow. I had been getting worried.

I sent Ain to get a report from the pair. The numbers were promising. One of our precious engineers was dead, but we still had the other. That would have to be enough. The loss of Gth would have been far more devastating had the ship not developed a system of interspecies communication before the crash. The best news was of course the survival of Kit. Two dohl. That might be survivable. Not ideal, but we’d been working with just Ain, Kit and Gth for quite some time. It could be done.

We had plenty of atil, of course, and enough tahl for our current situation, although the low number would drastically limit our options once we were back in space and plotting to make it back to the heart planet. Charlie and Lln immediately headed for a rest chamber to sleep, and soon after, Kit arrived with two drakes. I sent Ain to debrief them, too, in case there were any discrepencies in their reports. There weren’t.

It seemed that our nest was as together as it was going to get. I left some callers on the lookout tower to keep broadcasting the nest signal, but we couldn’t wait for stragglers forever. Something had to be done to bring the drakes back in line, and we needed to build a ship; two seemingly impossible tasks. It was time to stop dithering and build a strategy. I would need to figure out how to lever Kerlin and Harlen to get the others. Perhaps one of them might know which drake had betrayed us; if we were to find and execute the traitor, then surely the others would fall back into line. I was their Princess and their captain. I merely had to find and destroy the one who sought to replace me, and they would have no reason not to return to the nest. I wasn’t worried. My caste had been doing this forever.

Of course, my caste had also been dying in that exact manner forever. But I was stronger and smarter than some mere drake. It was almost a relief to be against a drake, and not my sister for once. Queen Tatik had been my singular fear for over half of my lifetime, an unstoppable force out to destroy me above all else, her fleets vast and her power unfathomable. I’d had one shot to face her again, one chance to possibly win the empire, and a treacherous navigator had taken it from me. But perhaps they had done me a favour – the plan had been extremely dangerous, we’d been in a desperate situation already, and at least here we had space. Space to breathe, to plan, to rebuild forces. Being stranded was a serious problem, but for the first time since I’d entered the regency arena, we had one thing going for us – the empire thought we were dead. My sister thought I was dead.

For as long as that remained true, we had some measure of safety.

* * *

“So the Crown Jewel is really destroyed, then?” Queen Tatik asked.

Nelan hesitated. It was true that he had found absolutely no trace of the Princess or the Crown Jewel in the ruins of the ship. Logically speaking, the clearest conclusion was the obvious – they had been destroyed in an attempted flight from battle. This he already knew. This everyone already knew. But there was something that didn’t make sense, and he couldn’t quite figure out what. Something was wrong with the ruin.

Something was wrong with the Queen, too.

There were two ways to tell a Queen from a Princess, other than the obvious way of extrapolating from age. A Queen might be laying, in which case the egg sac attached to her underbelly would be a pretty obvious indicator, but even an active Queen only laid about ten per cent of the time. A more reliable indicator was her facial adornments; a Princess covered her face with a multitude of jewels of all sorts of colours, but when she took control of a nest, she carefully removed her facial jewellery and replaced it with pure black onyx. Of course, a Queen of the Out-Western Aljik Empire still retained a single ruby – the Crown Jewel – but changed the rest.

Queen Tatik had been, in effect, ruling the empire since her sister’s flight with the Stardancer, and she’d been laying for the Empire almost as long – the needs of an interplanetary nest did not wait for an extended regency fight. The situation had been uneasy and unconventional, but everybody had ignored the pretension because it was necessary for the nest and the empire’s survival. (Supplying the aljik troops to support an interplanetary empire was a difficult enough matter for a single Queen at the best of times, let alone vital issues of government.) She had not, as a matter of propriety, altered her facial adornments; even though she had allowed people to use her name and title her as Queen, she had been working behind the face of a Princess. An acknowledgement that the Empire had not yet been hers.

But now, her position was completely undisputed, her situation secure. She was the true and legitimate Queen of the Out-Western Aljik Empire. And yet she still had not altered her facial adornments. She still looked at him from amidst the glittering, colourful jewels of a Princess.

She shifted nervously as she asked. She spoke with uncertainty and disappointment.

All the evidence suggested that the entire crew of the Stardancer, including the Princess and the Jewel, were dead. There was no other sensible conclusion to draw. But Queen Tatik was acting as if she was still out there, needing to be tracked down. And Tatik knew the Rogue better than anyone.

So Nelan answered her question very carefully. “I have not yet found any evidence that the Crown Jewel still exists, my Queen. I’ve found no trace of it on the ship.”

“So it doesn’t exist any more?” she pressed.

“That is the most likely conclusion,” he said.

“You’re not sure.”

Nelan hesitated. He wasn’t really sure how to answer that. He could say ‘That’s right,’ and then she’d say, ‘Why not? What do you see?’, and he’d have to admit that he had no idea. But she knew the Rogue Princess better than anyone, and she sensed something amiss. Nelan knew spaceships very well, and he sensed something amiss. It might be paranoia, but between the two of them…

Finally he said, “I’m sure of very few things in this world, ma’am.”

Tatik looked at the ruin. She looked back at Nelan. “Keep looking, then,” she said. “Wherever you think it might be. Keep looking.”

“For how long, ma’am?”

“Until you’re convinced it doesn’t exist.”

A life of chasing a shadow. There were worse jobs. “Yes, ma’am.”

* * *

I woke up underground, feeling like a human-shaped bag of sand.

The deep droning of the nest signal was all through my head. The pitch was still just barely on the edge of my hearing, but it had been getting louder and louder as we climbed over a couple of little hills on the way to the nest. It made my whole body feel a little numb, which was frankly a blessing; all my little cuts and rashes still burned from their exposure to the sea. My feet had several fresh new cuts, courtesy of the sharp grey rocks scattered through the sand. I’d wrapped them in scraps of my space suit before going to sleep; it probably wouldn’t do much, but I should at least make some effort to avoiding infection. I had very little actual suit left.

I made myself sit up. My muscles, predictably, screamed. I opened my eyes. This did not provide me with much new information, as the room was quite dark, but I already knew where I was – a little side chamber just inside the massive nest that the aljik had constructed from sand, stone, woven twigs and dried mucous. I’d been too tired to ask where they’d gotten the sticks from. Or what the mucous was.

The smell in the nest was familiar. It took me a little while to realise why. It smelled like the aljik ring, back on the Stardancer; a sharp, swampy smell. The aljik ring had looked nothing like the nest, but to be fair I’d never seen much of it except the area around the door, and it had been misty and thick with reeds. Perhaps there’d been a small nest further back. Or perhaps there hadn’t been space to build one.

Lln moved into my field of view, a sudden patch of brightness. She had something luminous smeared on her forelimbs, which glowed a pale green. As a light source, it wasn’t great, but it showed where the walls near her were. “You’re awake!” she said.

“Unfortunately,” I grumbled. “Anything new shown up to try to kill us yet?”

“Don’t worry. We’ll be safe in the nest.”

“In my limited experience as a shanghaied pre-spaceflight individual who has nearly died in space several times and is now stranded on a mysterious planet, I’ve learned that nowhere is safe, and the safer you feel the more fucked you probably are,” I replied. “Is there any food or water?”

“There should be processing and storage chambers further in. There was no engineer to help design the nest, so it should have the basic, standard layout. We always build them pretty much the same, depending on environment and materials, unless an engineer plans something better. Come on.”

“Glad that wasn’t my job, I know fuck all about aljik nests.” I dragged myself to my feet and followed Lln out into a round tunnel. “Did the others show up?”

“Kit brought the two drakes. We don’t know where Kisa is yet.”

“Where are they?”

“I don’t know. I imagine that Kit is probably with the Princess. The drakes would be deep in the nest, where they can be… protected as necessary.”

“Hmm.” The tunnel opened into a tiny chamber on one side, about as big as the tunnel itself, then narrowed again. We passed several more such chambers before it opened into a proper. Larger chamber, several metres wide. Nothing seemed to be happening inside it. Several tunnels lead off from this chamber; Lln didn’t hesitate in leading us to one. I knew fuck all about aljik nests, but I knew one thing – if I were alone, I would immediately get hopelessly lost.

A few twisty tunnels and confusing forks later, we arrived at another chamber. This one was quite small and oval in shape; the far wall was only about four metres away, but it was about ten metres long. In the faint glow of Lln’s forelimbs, I could see several shelves built into the walls, made of the same stick-and-mucous combination as the rest of the nest.

This room seemed to interest Lln. She stopped here and carefully paced it out, then started inspecting the walls. I followed her. Whatever she was interested in, I couldn’t see it.

“What is it?” I asked.

“What’s what?”

“What are you looking for?”

“Oh, nothing. Let’s continue.”

“Nothing? We’re going to start bullshitting each other now, are we?”

Lln hesitated. “I’m trying to deduce the plan,” she admitted.

“The plan?”

“Getting off this planet will be difficult. This room suggests that my sisters are as sure of that as I am. I am interested in knowing what the nest’s strategy is, but I don’t really have enough information to work with here. I will have to talk to people.”

“Back up. What strategy? What can you learn here?”

“Well, it’s the [unknown aljik term] chamber,” she said, as if that explained everything.

“The… what chamber?”

“The… where the small ones come from eggs.”

“Oh, like an incubation chamber,” I said. Using the English word. “Show me the word again?”

She did. I copied it, trying to memorise it.

“Okay,” I said, “so why does it matter? Remember, I’m kind of in the dark here.”

“Well, it’s usable.”

“… Good?”

“I mean, it’s usable, but only just. It is very small.”

“Okay, Lln, I know you think you’re being informative but – ”

“We always build nests on the same general plan unless we have another plan to work from. Without an engineer, we don’t. So it is not surprising for an incubation chamber to be here; this is where it goes. Understand?”

“I suppose.”

“The Princess wishes to leave this planet. The will of the nest is to leave this planet. This chamber has nothing to do with that; it would exist because it is in the plan, but it does not actually have to take up this much space. It was built deliberately to be of a size that can actually incubate eggs. You understand?”

“… Oh. So even though we want to leave, this is built on the assumption that we might not be able to?”

“A good conjecture, but the issue is a bit deeper than that. This chamber is small. Small enough that somebody who is not an atil might indeed think that this is the minimum size. They would walk through here and not be concerned. The Princess would walk through here and notice that she has room to lay eggs, but would not see any indication that this is anybody’s decision but her own. See?”

“Oh. The atil are going out of the way not to… spook her, I suppose. But giving her options.”

“Yes. This suggests a general consensus that we will need a new generation, here, on this planet, and that the nest is encouraging the Princess to create that generation as soon as possible.”

“Is… is that good or bad?”

“Difficult to tell. It may be that my sisters, who presumably have a better scope of the lay of the land and our resources than I do, anticipate a semi-permanent or even permanent setup on this planet. They may have given up any hope of leaving, and intend for us to quietly colonise this and develop space travel all over again several generations hence, and simply hope that we are not found by Queen atil’s descendants out here. I hope this is not the case.”

“Yeah, fuck that. I’m not dying on this planet.”

“It could also mean the opposite. It could mean that we want to increase our numbers in preparation for our return to space, and want to get started on that as quickly as possible. We will need more engineers and more tahl if we are to take on Queen Tatik. We will need some shyr, too. This could take some time. Queens only lay female eggs, and the caste is determined by incubation conditions. Dohl and engineers are the children of ahlda, so to get engineers, we need to raise at least one ahlda to maturity from the Princess’ eggs, then wait for her to lay engineers, and raise and train those. The chamber conditions determine the ratio of female castes, which would tell me more about what the plan is. If we want to fight the drakes, for example, there should be a lot of space for tahl eggs; if we want to get into space faster, there should be some for ahlda so that they can produce engineers, and also some shyr – we were badly lacking shyr. There’ll be space for at least one egg to develop into a Princess, of course; a nest without any backup rulers is unacceptably vulnerable. I’d like to know how many Princesses my sisters plan to incubate, though.”

I was a couple of sentences behind on this explanation. “Hang on, I don’t know anything about ahlda or shyr,” I cut in.

“Ahlda lay males and tend to travel a lot. They’re annoying. Shyr are a very stealthy warrior caste. We want a lot of them if we intend to take on the Queen. The details don’t matter.”

“Okay, okay.” I tried to get my head around all the information. “So… what are the chamber conditions like? What kind of nest population are we going for?”

“I don’t know. This room is unfinished; the temperature and humidity hasn’t been altered yet.”

“Well, the nest is still being built,” I shrugged. “I guess they’ll get round to it eventually.”

“That is certainly the sort of conclusion an engineer might draw,” Lln said evasively.

“You think it’s something more dramatic than that?” I guessed.

Lln flicked a mandible in the aljik equivalent of a shrug. “I still have very little information about what’s been going on.”

“Come on, Lln.”

Lln hesitated. After a moment she ventured, “Your conclusion is the sort of conclusion a Princess might draw, too.”

Oh.

They had built a chamber that was small enough to not make the Princess suspicious, but big enough to use when she inevitably realised that she would need to lay more aljik. Anticipating the need without her realising it. They had left it without the variety of conditions that would encourage different castes to develop, and this, too, was something that the Princess would not find suspicious, but that Lln evidently did. The reason was pretty obvious, when considered from an atil’s point of view.

They didn’t want the Princess to know in advance what the caste ratio was going to be. They wanted to decide what it would be, and apparently their decision wasn’t something that they thought the Princess would like.

I imagined huge incubation chambers in larger, more prosperous nests, patiently tended by aljik. Patient, unassuming aljik, who people barely noticed as they went around building and maintaining tunnels, bringing in supplies, tending to the needs of the nest and the Court. The Queen of a nest made the ultimate decisions; she decided what aljik to put to what tasks, where to explore and scout, how to utilise the nest’s resources. But who decided what those resources to store, how far the nest would stretch out, and what aljik to be available? I imagined atil, noticing that a lot of tahl had been killed in battle, altering conditions to produce more to replace them. I imagined them deciding that a war was causing a drain in the nest, and raising less tahl instead. I imagined atil watching, working, coming to the conclusion that a Queen was not making decisions that benefitted the nest very well, and quietly setting aside a large area to raise a dozen strong, ambitious, regicidal Princesses…

“Queens don’t rule an aljik nest, do they?” I asked Lln.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said evasively. “Come on, food storage is this way.” She led the way out of the incubation chamber. I followed, trying to figure out whether atil were as dim as they seemed. Individually, I concluded, they probably were. But it was a mistake to evaluate the skills or intelligence of an aljik in isolation.

It was the whole nest that you needed to keep an eye on.

* * *

water wet air? air! dry breathe

more me hello

where warm where voice

OUTSIDER no more me hello

food smell where hungry eat grow see

remember

find more me remember find them


	7. Best-Laid Plans

It was two days later when I looked up from a complicated pile of twigs to see Ain walking past on his way to the surface.

“Hey! Ain!” I jogged over.

Ain shrank back at the sight of a human yelling and running toward him. I adopted a less threatening pace. It had taken several days of relying on each other for mutual survival for Kit to stop being jumpy around me, too. Dohl were smart, and a healthy level of caution towards a nightmare being of legend hanging around their nest was probably reasonable.

He caught himself, though, and I pretended not to notice. “What is it?” he asked.

“I need to talk to Kerlin,” I said as casually as I could. “Seen him around anywhere?”

“The drakes are busy,” he said quickly.

“Whelp, I can’t be busy until I talk to Kerlin. Captain Nemo wants me to look over the design of the nest and work my genius engineer magic to make it as great as it can be. She gave me this map.” I pointed.

“I am aware. What does that have to do with the drakes?”

“This map, I’m sure you’ve noticed, is a giant pile of tangled twigs.”

“Yes?”

“I can’t read this. ‘Complicated twig pile’ is not a format of documentation that my people are literate in. It’s useless to me without a translator. Normally Tyzyth would help, but he’s super dead, and Glath is… missing in action.”

“And you think that Kerlin could teach you better than an aljik?” he asked, not even trying to hide his suspicion.

“Kerlin was teaching me how to use the Stardancer’s computer systems before we crashed,” I said patiently. “We spent a lot of time on it. He’s used to translating things into terms I can understand. So, yes, if you want me to work my fancy engineer magic on this warren – and the Princess does want that – I need to work with Kerlin.”

“How very convenient,” he said slowly.

“I know you haven’t had much chance to use the shared language, what with this being an all-aljik base for awhile, but that’s definitely not the meaning of ‘convenient’. Convenient would be a two-dimensional pictorial map with a proper scale, like a sensible civilisation would use.”

“… Very well. I will guide you.”

“If you’re busy, I can get Lln to take me. The atil.”

“If you like.” He rushed off on whatever very important mission I’d distracted him from. I carried my ridiculous stick tangle map to the main storage room and just waited for Lln to get hungry and drop in for a snack.

I’d spent the past few days learning how aljik nests worked, in between my various engineering duties (which were generally light and easy; everyone already knew what they were doing and there weren’t enough resources or people to need to calculate complicated distribution networks). I had, for instance, asked about the small chambers I’d noticed on my way between the resting chamber I’d gone to sleep in after we first arrived, and the incubation chamber. They were guard alcoves, each just big enough for a tahl to stand in with no room for them to be flanked. They could pour in behind invaders from such a position. There were twelve such alcoves in the chambers surrounding the incubation chamber, and four more on each of the two nest entrances. This told me two very important things – first, the atil considered the incubation chamber to be important enough to guard more heavily than the majority of the nest itself, so they definitely had plans for a rapid population increase. Second, whatever population makeup they were going for included at least twenty tahl for guarding duties – presumably more, if they were needed for patrolling or actively removing threats.

This wasn’t a great sign. We hadn’t encountered any major threats, which lead me to believe that they were probably planning for a war against the drakes. I wasn’t entirely sure why. They couldn’t be in preparation for battle against the Queen; we wouldn’t be taking the physical structure of the nest into space.

Not that I knew how we were going to get into space.

Come to think of it, those sentry positions suggested not only that we were going to have a lot of tahl, but that the atil expected us to be planetside for a good long time after they were mature. How many generations did they expect us to be grounded? How long was an aljik generation?

If they wanted males, that meant at least two generations – the Princess had to lay ahlda, and those ahlda had to lay males. We were short on both engineers and dohl, the two male castes, but I didn’t see how laying more would help. The engineers would have to be taught their trade to be useful spaceship builders, and there was nobody to teach them. I knew jack, the rest of the aljik knew even less, and the drakes weren’t likely to help us any time soon, even if they could, which I doubted. The dohl situation was even more pointless. I wasn’t sure exactly how aljik genetics worked (I couldn’t tell if the aljik had no concept of genetics or if finding a common language to talk about it was just really difficult for some reason), but the simple facts were that any aljik born on-planet would be the descendants of three people – the Princess, Kit and Ain. Producing more mates for the Princess wasn’t exactly useful if all they could do was cycle the genes of herself and her existing mates back to her. If we were trapped permanently on-planet, there’d be no choice but to use an incestuous line of descent for the nest – there simply weren’t any other genetic sources available – but that was an unacceptable situation. I refused to be trapped on-planet for the rest of my life. (This had never felt unacceptably limiting on Earth, but then, on Earth I had other humans, and the internet, and an environment I had actually evolved to deal with. None of this too-red sun and acid sea bullshit.)

Lln eventually did drift by, and I flagged her over. “Hey, can you show me where Kerlin is? I get super lost in here.”

She hesitated. “I can’t without – ”

“Ain wants me to talk to him about an engineering thing.”

“Oh. Well, this way, then.” She turned and led me down a corridor.

The aljik were pretty deep in the nest. This was an impractical political necessity. Technically, they were allies, not prisoners; they had voluntarily approached the nest and the Princes had no reason to suspect that they had ever betrayed her. They were ‘good’ drakes. Besides, putting guards on them would be a waste of aljik resources.

But everyone knew that they could very easily ferret information to the rebel drakes if they were to just wander around. It was pretty clear, although unspoken as far as I was aware, that leaving the nest would get them suspected of spying and have them thrown back down with guards as fast as said guards could be summoned. So everybody was sort of pretending that they were hanging around in the lower levels because they wanted to.

Lln showed me into a chamber where the two drakes were pacing. Kerlin glared at me as I approached. “What do you want?”

“Help reading a map,” I said. “Thanks for showing me down, Lln. Sorry, I interrupted you when you were getting a meal, didn’t I?”

“It’s no problem,” she said. “I can wait.”

“You shouldn’t have to, your health is important. Why don’t you go eat and come back for me later? I can’t find my way out on my own but this’ll probably take a while. It looks complicated.”

Lln looked between me and the drakes. “… Alright. I’ll be back later.”

“Thanks.” I waited until she was out of sight before continuing. “Are you two okay? What’s going on?”

“We’re fine,” Kerlin said sarcastically. “Back home with the nest. Couldn’t be better.”

“We’re mostly healed from the journey,” Harlen said. “The resource acquisition for the nest is… delicate, but stable if we’re careful.”

I nodded. “That’s why I was sent down here. I’m supposed to use my amazing engineering skills to make sure the nest is as efficient as it can be. Ain let me down here so that you could teach me this map format.” I gestured to by twig ball. “He clearly has no idea how long that’ll take, so we have time, but I don’t know when Lln will come back, and we need to plan where aljik won’t overhear us, so we should try to work quick.”

“Plan what?” Kerlin asked. “Why?”

“We’re planning how to adjust this design to include an unguarded tunnel that can get you out of here. There’s a forest to the East where a lot of drakes have gathered and built some sort of territory. I’m guessing the aljik didn’t tell you that, but if we can get you to the trees without being spotted...”

“Wait a minute,” Harlen said, “aren’t you on the aljik’s side?”

“I’m going to find a way off this planet, if that’s what you mean,” I said, “but no. I’m not on anyone’s side. I’m on the ‘let’s all stop being dicks to each other’ side. We’re few in number and we lose every time, but I have faith that someday, somehow, we will all be able to stop being dicks to each other for five fucking minutes. Now are you going to help me help you escape, or what?”

* * *

Aljik maps were a nightmare, no matter how you looked at it. In the end it was easier for Kerlin to just explain features to me than it was to teach me how to read it myself.

I had a rough idea of the aboveground layout already. The single observation tower was in the Northern end of the nest, the important end. Not far further North than that, the landscape abruptly dropped off at a cliff, and at the bottom of the cliff was just smoke and shadow that was impossible to see through. The network of Western tunnels went to the sea we’d crossed to the Southwest; they didn’t surface there, but ran close enough to the water that moisture filtered through the sand and could be processed to make it drinkable. South of the nest was a long stretch of sand and stone, identical to the ocean shore. The land wasn’t flat; it rose and fell in what could be considered large hills or small mountains, depending on your point of view.

Where we wanted to go was East, into the thick forest that apparently contained, somewhere within it, the drake rebel camp. But there was simply no way I was going to be able to convince anyone to dig further in that direction. We were going to have to get out somewhere else, and sneak around. Which meant either North or South. Out into the mountains… or off a cliff and into the mysterious darkness below.

The vote was unanimous for mountains.

“What are you going to tell them to convince them to dig out there?” Harlen asked.

I shrugged. “Some bullshit I guess. I’m the engineer, I don’t think they’ll ask too many questions. I wish I still had my books with me. They made everything so much easier.”

“You can get it done, though?”

“Yeah. I can’t give you any guarantees on time, but I don’t think anyone’s leaving this planet fast, so...”

“Hi, Lln!” Kerlin exclaimed. I turned. Lln was, indeed, returning.

“Hi, Kerlin! Isn’t this nest great? It’s a bit rough since we don’t have real supplies, but it’s so much better than the metal walls of the Stardancer, yeah?”

“Uh… yeah.”

“You done, Charlie?”

“For now,” I said, picking up my map. “I’ll get to work and come back if I need more information, guys.”

“Looking forward to it,” Kerlin said. Harlen flicked a tailspur in acknowledgement.

“So do you know how to read the maps now?” Lln asked as we made our way back down the corridor.

“Enough for now. We’ll have to see if it’s enough.”

“I am sure you’ll be fine. The basic design is serving fine for now. You probably won’t need to make too many very dramatic adjustments.”

Which was the problem. How was I going to convince them to make dramatic adjustments?

How, in the midst of a struggle for survival and a brewing war, was I going to convince them to build an escape tunnel for their own prisoners?

* * *

The core tree grew strong. We all shed our skins on it, and two of our number had shed their last and had started growing their female fangs. They moved deeper into the forest, searching for the perfect place to plant their own core seeds when the time came. Their seeds grew within them, and our tree grew stronger and taller, and the little white buds of gestation pods began to form. We could bear any hardship, and trial that the planet would throw at us. The Princess’ whole court could bear down on us and we would stand fast.

We had something to fight for.

* * *

“I suppose,” Queen Tatik said sternly, “that you are going to explain why one of my scout ships appears to be mostly molten slag?”

Nelan glanced over at the sorry mess heaped next to the remains of the Stardancer without any guilt. The Queen was exaggerating; several ship systems were still perfectly distinguishable, although a bit deformed. He looked back to the model of the Stardancer in his claws. “So this is what the Rogue Princess’ ship looked like when it was a prison ship,” he explained.

“It’s the ugliest ship I’ve ever seen,” she admitted. “I’m surprised the Rogue didn’t go insane on such a thing.”

“I think she was already insane,” Nelan ventured, earning a rare giggle from the Queen. “The point is, they have dash shielding at both ends, right? And the shields overlap in the middle to properly shield the whole ship.”

“If you say so,” the Queen said.

“I do say so. The thing is, it’s not great shielding. This isn’t a military vessel. it’s not supposed to dash at all, and even if it needs to, aside from a few guards there’s nobody important aboard. So there’s no reinforcing and not much in the way of backups, like in our ships. To blue dash at all, the Princess must have had it modified. The end shields are all there are, and you need both of them to shield the ship. The Rainbow Destroyer cut the ship in half, about… here.” He showed her on the diagram. “This removes one shield, and the other isn’t strong enough to shield much more than the very end of the ship by itself. They’re not designed to work alone, see.”

“As you keep repeating,” the Queen said. “What’s your point? We know that the shielding failed during the blue dash; that is why we have so little left.”

“Well, yes, but we shouldn’t have this little left.”

“What do you mean?”

Nelan strode over to the wreck of the Stardancer. “This is where the escape pods attach to the ship,” he explained, showing the ruined clamps. “There wwre definitely still some escape pods attached after the fight with the Rainbow Destroyer, but as you can see, there’s nothing there now. At first I figured they were burned away when the shielding failed, but then I took a closer look at the clamps, and ran some experiments. Look at the difference between the clamps here, and here.” He indicated an escape shuttle clamp that was worn beyond functionality, and one almost completely melted away.

Then he strode over to the scout ship he’d used for his experiments. “I modified the shielding and clamp design to be as similar as I could get it to the Stardancer. I ran it through a green dash with some escape pods still in place – as you can see, the wreckage of the pods is still there.”

Queen Tatik poked at the ruin. “Hardly survivable, though.”

“Actually they were still functional – although barely – after the green dash. The ruin is from later testing.”

“Later testing?”

“I’ll get to that in a bit. Look at the clamps, here.” He indicated an area where there were once presumably clamps. “Pretty similar to the Stardancer clamps that are completely ruined, although there’s a bit more damage on our ship. I think the Stardance crew pulled some kind of shield-strengthening trick I’m not aware of. Anyway, I removed the escape pod from here before the tests – this is what happens to exposed clamps. But here, look at these clamps.” He indicated a second set of escape pod docking clamps. These ones were damaged beyond functionality, but still recongiseable as clamps. “Much less damaged, see? Like the other set I showed you on the Stardancer.”

“Where is this going?” the Queen asked.

“I had an escape pod here for the green dash,” he explained. “The pod took a lot of damage, but shielded the clamps.”

“What you’re saying,” Queen Tatik said slowly, “is that there were escape pods attached during the dash, but there is no evidence of their ruins now, yes? But the area was searched for escapees. There was nothing. Are you sure their shield didn’t just weaken earlier than your test one, and vaporise the pods?”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Nelan said. “But no. Here’s the cool part, and this took a while to figure out, believe me.” He reached into the ruin of his test ship and poked something. With a squeak of grating metal, the ruins of an escape pod dropped free.

“Watch the drop,” Nelan said, too late, as the Queen flinched back. “Look here. This is what the clamps look like under an escape pod. Barely any damage at all.”

“Then what did you do to get the clamps similar to the ones on the Stardancer?”

Nelan looked around and leaned close, as if sharing a great secret. “I put it through a blue dash with failing shielding,” he said triumphantly.

“Why a blue dash?”

“After the green. I put this ship through a green dash with some exposed clamps.” He indicated the completely ruined clamps. “Then I dropped off an escape pod, which exposed mostly intact clamps. Then I put it through a blue dash to bring it home. This is the result.”

“The ship was in the location it arrived in after a green dash, though,” the Queen pointed out.

“Exactly! It’s the perfect plot. Well, not completely perfect, since it left the clamps. The Stardancer green dashes to a location, blue dashes to a nearby location, drops off escape pods – thus exposing new clamps – and then blue dashes back, leaving a lifeless ruin too burned to inspect for the military to find.”

“So there were survivors,” the Queen said carefully.

“I think so.”

“How sure are you?”

“Hard to put a number on it It’s the only theory I have. But there might be other things that could cause this kind of thing, things I haven’t thought of yet.”

“Keep thinking, then. I want as much information as you can give me, based on the assumption that there were survivors.”

“And if they weren’t?”

“I have a whole empire of people out there who think my sister is dead. We can afford to have you be the alternate contingency. If she exists, find her.”

“How?”

“You’re the engineer, Nelan. But first step… figure out how far they could have jumped to, and back from, in the time available after the green dash and before our forces arrived. That gives us a search radius. Now please excuse me; I need to get every scout ship in the area to the green dash site.”


End file.
